News from Monday Books

ALL OVER TO WORDPRESS

2010-08-13T15:39:00.004+01:00

WE WON'T BE UPDATING THIS BLOG FROM TODAY ONWARDS - WE'VE NOW MOVED TO WORDPRESS.

IF YOU'RE AT ALL INTERESTED IN OUR WITTERINGS, PLEASE VISIT http://mondaybooks.wordpress.com/

YOU CAN STILL SEARCH THE ARCHIVES FOR WITTERINGS FROM DAYS GONE BY, OF COURSE.

Dr Copperfield in the Daily Mail today

2010-07-27T11:08:00.002+01:00

Full details at our new Wordpress blog

This (Blogger) blog is no longer being updated.

PC David Copperfield is back!

2010-07-25T10:26:00.000+01:00

And he's mad as hell!

Well, not really. He's just writing 1,000 words about British policing, from his Canadian perspective, in the Sunday Telegraph.

Full details at our new blog address:

http://mondaybooks.wordpress.com/

(Also, a great piece about prisons by Theodore Dalrymple and some other media stuff about Dr Tony Copperfield - no relation.)

Gadget in the Telegraph

2010-07-21T14:57:00.002+01:00

Full details at our new Wordpress blog.

http://mondaybooks.wordpress.com/

A NEW POST ON BEDROOM BUREAUCRACY

2010-07-20T11:39:00.000+01:00

(and police nonsense too) is up at our new blog, over at Wordpress:

http://mondaybooks.wordpress.com/

We won't be updating properly at Blogger any more, so please update your links (if you're in the least bit interested in our witterings).

WE HAVE MOVED TO WORDPRESS

2010-07-19T17:08:00.001+01:00

LOTS OF PEOPLE WHO KNOW MUCH MORE ABOUT BLOGGING AND COMPUTERS THAN WE DO HAVE BEEN SUGGESTING FOR A LONG TIME THAT THIS BLOG SHOULD MOVE TO WORDPRESS.

ACCORDINGLY, HAVING NO MINDS OF OUR OWN, WE HAVE GIVEN IN AND MOVED THE BLOG TO WORDPRESS.

ALL SIX OF OUR REGULAR READERS CAN NOW FIND US AT:

http://mondaybooks.wordpress.com/

IT'S SO EXCITING.

Dr Copperfield Reviews

2010-07-16T10:43:00.001+01:00

Andrew Lansley and his SpAds have asked to see copies of Dr Tony Copperfield's SICK NOTES (free extract here). It certainly contains lots more examples of waste, where cash which might be spent on patients is instead shovelled into the gaping bureaucratic maw.

Meanwhile, here are a few online reviews of the book:

Fellow GP Dr Jest says: 'I suspect this book will be regarded as something of a niche market publication, but I hope it manages a wider circulation... if I have one wish it is to make it compulsory reading for all PCT managers and Chief Executives. Indeed I’m thinking of passing my copy on to our own Beloved Leader, assuming it’s still in a fit state when my partners have done with it. I get the feeling there is a real gulf of understanding between our two disciplines, and I think Tony Copperfield might have give us a means of bridging the divide. So if you’re an NHS administrator, a politician in or aiming for the Health Department, or if you’re remotely interested in the workings of our shared profession, you owe it to yourself to read this book.'

Hospital consultant Dr Zorro says: 'Although I was offered a free copy of the book to review I chose instead to buy my copy. Among other reasons this I think allows me more impartiality than if I had accepted the gift. The cost of the book was money well spent. This book should be read by doctors , managers and patients, and anyone else who is concerned about the state of our NHS.'

Northern Doctor confesses to a slight discomfort at Copperfield's apparently endless bad days, but adds that the book 'beautifully highlights some of the more ludicrous examples of the NHS at its most wasteful. When it comes to shooting bureaucratic fish in a barrel Copperfield is one of the finest shots in the NHS.'

The chemists are less gushing ('Pharmacists snarl at GP's remarks').

A Tale of Two Copperfields

2010-07-12T10:31:00.001+01:00

Copperfield (Dr) appears in the Times today, writing about the government's new plans to smash the bureaucracy.

He's not 100% persuaded (can't prove a Times link as we haven't yet subscribed, but if you click on the image the column will appear).

Meanwhile, Copperfield (PC) popped up on BBC1's new Sunday ethics show yesterday. It was all about whether the police should be routinely armed, and he gamely dialled in on his webcam from his Canadian redoubt to say that, yes they should.

He's living a high old life in Canada, by the way. In Burton on Trent he lived in a 2-bed terraced house looking out onto a main road covered with litter and doggerel and earned around £30k a year to be threatened and abused by morons. In Edmonton, he's got a big detached house with a huge fridge, all the guns one man could possibly need and he earns more the a UK police inspector would for doing a job he really enjoys.

You can read free extracts of the two Copperfields' books here and here.

Media Stuff

2010-07-08T10:13:00.000+01:00

Frank Chalk was interviewed by ITN for the 10 o'clock news yesterday. The thrust of the piece was about new rules coming in to help teachers control rowdy kids and confiscate mobile phones, legal highs, pornography and cigarettes.

It was a bit blink-and-you-miss-it, but if you click on this link you can see the great man opining.

Chalk wrote about this stuff in It's Your Time You're Wasting. Lots of people thought he was making it up (ie that kids in some schools watch porn, drink and take drugs in the classroom), and The Times published a review saying it was a 'sour and vituperative' book (to be fair, they also said it was 'addictive'). I suppose not too many Times journos send their kids to terrible inner city comps, though.

Had a long chat with PC David Copperfield yesterday. Now a policeman in Canada, I wondered if he'd like to step into the breach vis a vis the BBC1 prog this Sunday (see previous blog post), part of which will be about whether or not the cops should be armed.

While working in Burton on Trent he was of the opinion that they ought to be, and his experiences on the other side of the Atlantic have only reinforced this belief. He drives around with a bootful of automatic weapons and shotguns, and says the streets are about as safe as can be. It takes all sorts (he has just taken delivery of his own personal AR15).

Anyway, he should be on the telly on Sunday morning, talking live via webcam from his bunker in Edmonton.

Reality TV With Guns

2010-07-07T10:24:00.001+01:00

We were approached yesterday by BBC1 to see if Inspector Gadget would take part in their new show Sunday Morning Live this weekend. I think they were attracted by the (literally) hundreds of comments he's getting these days, and by his constant insistence that all British cops should be armed, all the time.

I called him (on the secure phone, obviously) to discuss this and sadly he declined, as he declines all such offers. I got chatting to him about this arm-the-cops business, and said I was sceptical; his reply was, what do we know that most of the other countries in Europe (where they do arm the police) don't, and what do we think about the fact that Derrick Bird was able to walk away from unarmed officers to continue his spree a few weeks back? Good questions, I suppose.

The whole thing is made for Monday Books authors, actually. I'll bet Moat was (semi)educated by a teacher like Frank Chalk, treated for depression etc by doctors like Tony Copperfield, arrested by cops like Gadget, Bloggs and Copperfield and assessed in prison by a psychiatrist like Theodore Dalrymple. He'll probably be attended by a paramedic like Stuart Gray when he shoots himself, or is shot. Later, our in-house neuroscientist, Simon Le Vay, might be called in to examine his brain. (I confess I'm struggling to think of a role for Austin Healey.)

I also chatted to Dalrymple yesterday, and mentioned Moat to him (he's in France at the moment, and was unaware of the lunacy). He enjoyed (and was not surprised by) Moat's suggestion, after shooting his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend, that the trigger was actually pulled by a combination of the police and the injured woman, and not Raoul Moat, Esq.

This is the kind of thing he (Dalrymple) has been hearing first hand from people like Moat, and writing about, for a couple of decades now; I recommend Second Opinion, as I would, for more insights into this mad netherworld.

Talking of PC Bloggs (who we've suggested to the Beeb as an alternative to Gadget), the people who bought the rights to Diary of an On Call Girl are currently on telly with Rev (starring the brilliant Tom Hollander and the even better Lucy Liemann).

James Wood, co-creator of Rev is the guy who adapted the Bloggs book; sadly it was eventually rejected, but he's the hottest thing in showbiz (or nearly), interest is renewed. Watch this space! (Or don't, it's up to you.)

FREE EXTRACTS FROM ALL OF OUR TITLES ARE AT WWW.MONDAYBOOKS.COM

War/Restrepo

2010-06-30T12:38:00.002+01:00

Sebastian Junger's new book War is an astonishing, brilliant, thoughtful and affecting read (interview in the Telegraph here) and his documentary Restrepo, made with the British photographer Tim Hetherington, has won the Grand Jury documentary prize at Sundance. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell the only place you can watch it is in Edinburgh, whereas Get Him To The Greek is on everywhere. Seems an odd system of values we have sometimes!

Here is Junger (also author of The Perfect Storm) talking about the experience in five parts at Uncommon Knowledge:

Here's a trailer from the film.

Harry Mount on Books

2010-06-23T09:56:00.003+01:00

Harry Mount agrees with Sir Tom Stoppard (blog passim) about our relationship to books, asking in today's Telegraph, 'How did the British mind shrink to this?'

I've got university-educated friends who don't read newspapers or difficult books, and never even watch the news on telly. And it's not as if they've completely replaced the printed page with online pages, or moving images for that matter. In fact, they still buy quite a lot of magazines – but they are picture-dominated celebrity magazines; and their reading barely goes beyond the 30-word caption beneath the photo of an overweight celebrity exiting a cupcake shop in Greenwich Village.

I suspect we all have friends like this - intelligent people who are just no longer interested in or curious about the world around them. Maybe they're too comfortable? I don't know.

I do know that I was bought Paul Weller's Wake Up The Nation as a father's day gift (I've followed the career of Mr Weller since 1977, more or less).

It's 'a parade-worthy triumph' according to the BBC's Chris Lo; Alexis Petridis in the Guardian says it is 'shocking and thrilling'. The Daily Telegraph's Andrew Perry says: 'Weller's new album's relentless vigour is exhausting but he strikes gold all over again.' The Independent gives it five stars, and Danny Baker says it is 'his materpiece', apparently. 'Essentially,' says the NME, 'he doesn't give a fuck.' (This being, to the NME, the highest expression of the art, outweighing all other considerations, such as melody, rhythm and general quality.)

The Monday Books verdict: an unlistenable, cacophonous, discordant, jangling chow-row, with meaningless lyrics and pompous sleeve notes.

Mark Steyn would frown at us even having an opinion (and he's probably right, sadly).

No VAT on Books, Corporation Tax Down, NI Rise Scrapped

2010-06-22T13:20:00.000+01:00

We might even think of employing another office hand, now.

VAT on Books?

2010-06-22T09:50:00.003+01:00

Before the serious business, there's a nice review of Sick Notes HERE from blogging doc Dr Jest. Thanks Dr Jest - much appreciated.

OK, now the serious business. We're watching the budget with interest today. If VAT goes on books, and we think it might, it will have pretty serious ramifications for publishing.

I was interested to hear Luke 'Borders' Johnson on Evan Davis's excellent Bottom Line the other day. Johnson said he went in to Borders thinking it was just another failing business he could turn around with cost savings, efficiencies and so on; he left convinced that the High Street bookstore is 'doomed'.

One way to accelerate that demise (if he's right) would be to make books more expensive.

Meanwhile, Tom Stoppard says 'books are being left behind as an increasing amount of young people’s time is spent focusing on the moving image'.

I think it's pretty obvious that this is correct (though some people will say it doesn't matter). I was in (one of the two) Waterstone's in Coventry on Saturday and heard a man say impatiently to his daughter (who was about eight or nine, and was browsing a little aimlessly in the childrens' section): 'Oh, come on Katie... I'd rather hang about in a sweet shop than here.'

He didn't even know what a book was, and didn't seem to want his little girl to find out either. Almost tragic.

Advice

2010-06-21T13:27:00.000+01:00

If you are writing to a publisher offering your services as a proofreader, do not send this email:

hi
Just wondered if I could assist with any freelance copyediti ng/proofreading projects?
best regards, rob

Sending an email offering yourself as a proofreader which manages to contain three errors in 16 words is bizarre.

Similarly, if you are submitting a manuscript to a publisher of non-fiction books, which publisher specifically requests no unsolicited attachments, do not send an unsolicited attachment for a novel based in 18th century Raj India (or an international spy yarn, or a love triangle in Soviet Russia).

Finally, if a publisher takes the time to read your manuscript - albeit that he takes a long time to do so - and sends back an email explaining, courteously, why it's not a book for him, and further takes the time to suggest other possible publishers who might be interested, why not have the common human decency to at least acknowledge that email (we get five submissions a week, we read them all [eventually] and only one in ten of the people we reject even bothers to reply thanking us for taking the trouble)?

I Could Spend All Day In Daunts

2010-06-18T14:20:00.001+01:00

Daunts Bookshop on Holland Park Avenue, that is (though all of this very small chain of indie bookshops is equally excellent).

That was where we held the soft launch of Dr Tony Copperfield's Sick Notes last night (free extract here).

Fifty or sixty guests turned up and drank their way through 20 bottles of cab shiraz and pinot grigio. We sold around 40 books, which means that, in purely financial terms, it was madness. But these events are not supposed to be about sales, and it was an enjoyable evening. Here's one of the two culprits, his anonymity cunningly preserved:

To my amazement, we're struggling slightly with getting much coverage for the book (so far, it will happen). This is unusual for us; we usually get a fair bit of stuff on national radio and in the newspapers and so on, and you'd have thought a couple of outspoken GPs prepared to discuss the state of the NHS, cyberchondria and the madness of 'Choose and Book' might be of interest. It dawned on me last night that it may not have been the most sensible thing to launch a book, without a major spend behind it, during the Football World Cup. Why didn't someone warn us?

Anyway, here are The Millionaires, Karmello Brooke and The Quotations.

The Hairdresser and the Book

2010-06-14T14:20:00.000+01:00

Steve Jobs said the Kindle would fail because 'no-one reads any more'. I don't know about that, but I do know an alarming number of people almost never read.

A member of the vast Monday Books team went to the hairdresser's on Saturday and met someone who had just bought his first book. He was 23 years old, and very excited about it (the book, not his age).

That day, I was at the wedding of a friend, a ~~loophole consultant to the rich and famous~~ tax lawyer. As you do, if you're a crashing bore, I asked a number of the guests to name the last book they had read. Most couldn't remember, and of those who could most named Tolley's Tax Guide or a Harry Potter. Bizarre.

It was a good wedding, and not just because attending it meant we we not tempted to watch the England vs USA football match. Monday Books' official position on the football world cup is clear: we don't much like football, and we like it even less with those South African kazoos blowing non-stop.

We prefer landscapes. Here's a blog with some beautiful photographs of the Scottish Highlands. Well worth visiting (the blog and the Highlands):

Generation F AI Cover

2010-06-07T10:19:00.007+01:00

Here's the AI (Advance Information) cover for Generation F, the forthcoming book by Winston Smith.

It will change a bit between now and publication later in the year, but we like the title typeface, the glowering sky and the perspective effect produced by the convergence of the wall and the road; the idea is to create something which looks slightly reminiscent of the Soviet-era posters which were around at the time Orwell wrote 1984, the book from which Winston (obviously) takes his nom de plume.

Interestingly (or not), while editing the book we needed to work out the cost of housing benefit payments, paid by local authorities out of council tax income, to keep young people in supported housing. In Winston's project, the cost is around £170,000 per annum; there are (or were, in 2006) 10,648 such projects in England and Wales. It should be simple multiplication, but our office 8-digit calculator exploded with the effort and registered an E. You can use your PC, but this online calculator is very useful, too.

As David Cameron sets out his stall in respect of taxation, state spending and the limits of government, Theodore Dalrymple has a piece in the latest edition of City Journal which repays reading. He looks at, among other things, the impact of sudden wealth on the Nauran people, British literacy rates in the pre-state education days (97%, apparently) and the collapse in predictable chaos of Julius Nyerere's utopian plans for socialist Tanzania - not that St Julius noticed (or minded):

The only time I ever saw Nyerere in person was in Dodoma, the dusty town designated to become Tanzania’s new capital.
He was expected to drive by, and by the side of the road sat a praise singer—a woman employed to sing the praises of important people. She was singing songs in praise of Nyerere, of which there were many, with words such as: “Father Nyerere, build and spread socialism throughout the country and eliminate all parasites.”
The great man drove past in a yellow Mercedes. The praise singer was covered in dust and started to cough.

A Blind Man In A Dark Room

2010-06-01T12:19:00.002+01:00

Maths was never my strong point (in a weak field of strong points) but I can heartily recommend Alex Bellos's new book, Alex's Adventures in Numberland. Here's an example of the sort of question he addresses:

I have two children. One is a boy born on a Tuesday. What is the probability I have two boys?

The answer (which feels to my literalist mind a bit of a cheat) is here. (This puzzle is also fascinating.)

Sort of maths-related, there are some diverting little brainteasers here, including this one:

In your cellar there are three light switches in the OFF position. Each switch controls 1 of 3 light bulbs on floor above.You may move any of the switches but you may only go upstairs to inspect the bulbs one time. How can you determine the switch for each bulb with one inspection?

From Orlando To Canvey Island, And Points In Between

2010-05-26T12:02:00.002+01:00

Just taking a break from editing the forthcoming Our Man in Orlando, the memoirs of Britain's former vice-consul in the Sunshine State, Hugh Hunter. Hugh spent a decade or so dealing with Brits in various states of distress in the USA; from scummy mummies caught shoplifting at Disneyworld, to blokes who wake up with hangovers to find they have butchered their girlfriends in the night (not a good career move in the death penalty territories), to people serving sentences of more than 1,000 years.

Here's the AI cover (it will change a bit):

Hugh is a former fireman from Romford, rather than your typical FCO mandarin; I wish I'd known about jobs like this myself a few years back - it sounds like a lot of fun. (The book will be out in August. US purchasers, please note: we only send free of postal change to UK addresses; you need to email us [as it says on our website] to enquire about postal charges to the US. Works out at around $7 I think.)

We've just agreed a serialisation deal for Sick Notes with The Daily Mail. There's an extract here.

Later in the year we have a couple more Dalrymples, a book about teaching and Winston Smith's Generation F coming out (plus, we hope, Contact Wait Out). But I can't deny that business at the moment feels like chugging along with your anchor dragging on the sea bed. Unless you're Quercus, who have just announced profits up by 4,150%, thanks to their Stieg Larrson books. Personally, I tried one once and found it unreadable, but there you go.

Finally, in a break from Monday Books' normal public service policy of providing blog readers with an occasional soundtrack of obscure soul records to while away the hours to, here's Wilko Johnson and Lee Brilleaux with All Through The City (if you haven't heard much Dr Feelgood, I can heartily recommend the recent Oil City Confidential as an intro):

Winston Smith Wins The Orwell Prize

2010-05-20T13:14:00.006+01:00

Monday Books author Winston Smith has won the Orwell Prize for his blog, Working With The Underclass.

I was happy to accept the award on his behalf at the prize-giving ceremony in Church House at Westminster last night (you might be surprised to learn that his real name isn't Winston Smith).

Here it is, on my mantelpiece at home this morning:

He also wins £3,000 which he'll need; pay isn't great in his industry.

The blog is an ongoing selection of anecdotes and stories from Winston's life as a care home and supported housing worker.

It's an interesting and occasionally truly shocking insight into a world most of us never see. Most of the comments to his blog (including from those who say they work in similar fields) are supportive, though some people think he oversteps the mark occasionally.

He gets accused of being a Tory hate-monger now and then, which I find very funny as he's anything but (he's actually almost a stereotypical lefty in many ways - Guardian reader, sociology degree, generally impeccably liberal views etc). It's just that, every day at work, he gets mugged by reality (and sometimes by the kids).

We're working on a book - which is different to the content on the blog - and will be publishing it later this year.

Although I hope it doesn't happen, I think there's a good chance he'll be exposed; ironically Richard 'Nightjack' Horton presented the prize.

From the Orwell Prize website:

This year’s Blog Prize judges were Richard Horton (police officer and winner of the Blog Prize 2009 as ‘Jack Night’) and Oona King (head of diversity at Channel 4).

The judges said: ‘Of course, we knew that we were picking another anonymous public sector blog with a name that would have the irony meter pegged in the red zone.

‘We could have agonised for hours and then passed Winston Smith over as too difficult, too dark, too much of a risk, but we were charged with judging the best.

‘Winston Smith's blog was the clear and unanimous choice of the judging panel.

‘There is a directness and clarity to his philippics that left them in our thoughts long after we had finished reading, but that was not enough.

‘What carried the day with us was his passion and conviction that we should know what wrongs had been done in our names in some of those places where most of us choose not to look.

‘There will be an inevitable interest in Winston Smith now that he has won an Orwell Prize but it is our hope that wider attention will fall on improving the situations that he describes so vividly rather than on the writer himself.’

Why Is Anyone Surprised?

2010-05-13T14:34:00.004+01:00

According to a report by the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies ('We're even more independent than before' ©), spending on the cops since 1998/9 is up by 48% to no discernible effect. (Easy-to-digest Times blog piece here.)

Overtime is up by 90%, a fact which has been all over the airwaves today.

Can anyone possibly say why this has happened?

Why, yes, they can... our three-way coalition of secret policewo/men, whose books are all available here:

In Diary of an On Call Girl, PC Bloggs reveals how she often has to sit one-to-one with prisoners on cell watches. The door is open, Bloggsy sits on one side of it and the prisoner sits on the other, moaning. For hours.

In Perverting the Course of Justice, Inspector Gadget reveals how, if you're a low-level criminal and you're finding being interviewed a bit of a bore, all you need to do is claim you're getting chest pains and the interview will be halted and you'll be rushed up to hospital by two officers, both of whom will sit by your bed while you 'recover'. For hours.

In Wasting Police Time, PC Copperfield famously revealed that it can take 20 hours or more (over the course of several weeks) to deal with the simple theft of a pedal bike WHERE YOU KNOW WHO THE THIEVES ARE.

If you want to have cops sitting outside cells, or at hospital bedsides, or filling in acres of forms for simple crimes, you are going to have to pay them to do it. Hence, the overtime.

Between them, the above three books have sold over 100,000 copies (and are still selling strongly). All were serialised in national newspapers, and the writers have been widely interviewed on the radio and telly.

So why is anyone surprised that modern 'policing' costs so much money?

PS We were very sorry to see Tony McNumpty go at the recent ~~shambles~~ election. He was a great tool (promotionally speaking).

PPS As usual, free excerpts from all the above books at the sidebar (top right of this page). As a special offer, we'll do buy-two-get-one-free for anyone who calls to order (01455 221752) in the next seven days.

Sick Notes...

2010-05-10T10:47:00.007+01:00

...is at the printers.

As with all our titles, there's a free extract at our website.
Dr Phil Hammond - Private Eye's 'MD', Countdown regular and all-round celebrity doc - has read it and gave us this line for the cover (thanks Phil):

'A wonderful book, funny and insightful in equal measure, and an ideal gift for all doctors and those brave enough to use them' - Dr Phil Hammond GP.

Meanwhile, the British Medical Journal, no less, says of Copperfield:

'Copperfield is simply fantastic, unbelievably funny and improbably wise… everything he writes is truer than fact.'

Here's the finished cover:

Polling Day

2010-05-06T11:11:00.002+01:00

Supermarkets and the internet have shown the most dramatic growth in market share over the past two decades at the expense of traditional bookshops, data from Book Marketing Ltd reveals (according to the Bookseller).

Given that the internet didn't really exist 20 years ago, this wasn't too much of a shock, I suppose. The rise of the supermarkets is apparently down to the 1995 abolition of the Net Book Agreement. Someone asked me the other day (as though my opinion was worth more than his) whether I thought it would be good to bring back the NBA. I said I didn't know: we'd sell fewer books at a higher price. Amazon would probably stop selling books, but some indies would stay open who would otherwise close.

Anyway, I can't see a new government reintroducing it - they're more likely to put VAT on books (which would be disastrous).

Talking of the election, I spent Saturday afternoon canvassing for one of the major parties in Rugby town centre.

My unscientific observations:

- Most Lib Dems in Rugby have beards (the men, anyway).

- Most Labour voters in Rugby are planning to vote BNP, Lib Dem or UKIP.

- Most Tory voters in Rugby don't much care for David Cameron, but the extent to which they don't care for Cameron is outweighed by a factor of 10 by the extent to which they would like to see Gordon Brown put up against a wall and shot. (Or at least, ejected from office.)

- There is no arguing with yelling, spitting men who tell you that they have been unemployed for 15 months and are going to vote BNP as a protest.

- Not every 22-year-old goth in drainpipe jeans, assorted facial ironmongery and mascara is a green/SWP/Respect voter. The one I stopped was UKIP!

I predict the Conservatives will defeat the Labour incumbent. But I might be miles out.

Finally, here's my favourite piece of general election ephemera. It was emailed to me last night by my younger brother, who saw it on some campaign literature in Hertfordshire. Is there anything that nice Nick Clegg won't do for votes!

Gadget, Stuart Gray In Times List Of '40 Bloggers Who Really Count'

2010-05-03T10:48:00.000+01:00

Two of our authors make The Times list of 40 Bloggers Who Really Count.

Stuart Gray's Paramedic's Diary is described thus:

Stuart Gray encounters more blood-curdling drama on a single shift than most people would in a year. A paramedic with the London Ambulance Service, he started blogging about his experiences in April 2006 and has since published two books about dicing with death (and injuries, drunkenness and hoax calls) on London’s streets. Compelling and plainly written, the blog allows Gray to vent about the emotional highs and lows of his job after a particularly intense night. Each post ends with a heartfelt plea to “be safe”.

Inspector Gadget gets this write-up:

Gadget lives in Ruralshire, “a county in England, not too far from Metrocity” – an anonymity measure, obviously, because if this police inspector had his identity revealed, he'd be out of a job. His blog is where he lets off steam about the Home Office, bureaucracy and political-correctness training courses. It’s provocative stuff, and as an insight into life on the policing front line in 2010, it’s invaluable.

Of course, you can read both of them in book form (most of the content is not on the blogs). Each is available from our website (overseas buyers welcome), or from Amazon.co.uk or most decent bookshops.

If you want to try before you buy, there's a free extract from Stuart's A Paramedic's Diary here and a free extract from Gadget's Perverting The Course of Justice here.

'Appalling' Non Fiction Sales in 2009 - Bookseller

2010-04-30T16:54:00.000+01:00

Non-fiction sales dropped by 12.6% in the UK in 2009, according to the Bookseller.

Let's hope Sick Notes (out very soon) bucks the trend!

Rob Chote's Booze Hell With Primal Scream Hellraiser (And Me)

2010-04-28T09:53:00.001+01:00

Not that you're interested, but thanks to the wonders of Sky+ I now record Newsnight and watch it bright eyed and bushy tailed with a bowl of fruit and fibre (instead of in my cups with a bottle of Glenmorangie).

This morning (ie last night), Rob Chote was on, demolishing Liam Byrne's argument that the government could not hold a comprehensive spending review ahead of the election because of all the 'uncertainty'. There'll still be uncertainty later in the year, said Rob, so that was no excuse. In fact, times of uncertainty were exactly when it was important to draw up plans. If you wait until the waters have calmed down, you find you're beneath them.

Many years ago, I shared a flat in Finsbury Park with Rob and an ex Primal Scream drummer called Gavin Skinner (a boyhood friend of mine and - for 80s/90s music trivia fans - brother of Julian Cope guitarist Donald Ross Skinner).

At the time, Rob was an Independent journalist; now he's the head of the IFS. It's all a long way from the flat roof in North London where we spent many a happy summer's evening sitting drinking Red Stripe and putting the world to rights. He hasn't aged at all, either.

On Monday night, Jeremy Paxman was taken to the cleaners by some Welsh guy I'd never heard of before. If you find Paxman a pompous, overbearing, smug, self-righteous, interrupting, deliberately-wrong-end-of-the-stick-grabbing bully, you should follow this link and zoom along to 35 min 58 sec.

Posted by Dan

The Book Fair

2010-04-22T17:31:00.001+01:00

I found myself at the London Book fair on Tuesday. I was supposed to be meeting Theodore Dalrymple's Dutch publisher, but he rang to say something about a volcano and that he couldn't make it. Weird.

I had a meeting with a very nice agent, but I think about two minutes in to the meeting we both realised it was pretty pointless. I was terribly hungover after a night out in Brixton with Tory Boy Tim and his friend Max, which didn't help. Every year I say I won't bother with the book fair; next year I won't.

Submissions came piling in thick and fast last week: did we appear on a blog or website somewhere? Most of them were fiction, so we weren't interested.

Winston Smith did make the Orwell Prize shortlist. I have heard on the grapevine that he may be about to be exposed by The Times (apologies to The Times if this is just an ugly rumour). Watch this space.

Oh, and Sick Notes goes to the printer this week.

Spelling, Booze and Wells

2010-04-19T09:53:00.000+01:00

Roy Greenslade on a spelling test for journalists (click the link, anyone can take part).

John Humphrys in the Sunday Telegraph on binge drinking (see blogs passim). The irony isn't hard to spot.

Astonishingly, this picture was taken at night by Michael Yon:

Read his report of life with the 1-17th infantry in Afghanistan here.The blurring on the other shots shows the kid of exposure times he's using to achieve results like the above, but it's still very impressive technology.

If you haven't read Yon before, you are really missing out. This post has some astonishing aerial pictures of the country, and then shots of US personnel digging wells in some of the most barren country on earth.

Do Not Read Baudrillard...

2010-04-16T16:05:00.000+01:00

...it's pseudo-philosophy - rhetorical and fucking useless.

So says 'Confused Matthew' in this highly amusing review of The Matrix Reloaded.

(Attention drawn by David Thompson.)

Have a great weekend!

Winston Smith in The Guardian, Daily Mail

2010-04-15T11:58:00.006+01:00

Winston Smith is a tired, frustrated care home worker, whose stories from the teenage wasteland make gripping, if slightly depressing, reading. We're publishing his book, Generation F, later this year, based on his blog (but with lots of additional material).

Yesterday, The Guardian picked up on Winston, running a major piece on him its Society section. It's a good read, but the comments underneath are almost more interesting.

You sense a battle is underway, between those whose eyes are open (see John Humphrys, blog passim) and those whose eyes remain resolutely, wilfully, shut.

On the one hand are people saying they work in the sector and see this stuff every day. 'Augiemarch' for instance, writes:

I have worked in care, on and off for about 5 years . . . some of the things I have witnessed have deeply affected me, politically, socially, and emotionally. Everything written above rings true, not only with the care of minors, but also within the fields of mental health, and the care of vulnerable adults, from what I have seen, and experienced.

'Licketyspit' says:

I also work with young people in care. Have done for 10 years.
While some of Winston's language may sound harsh to those not au fait with the care system, I think that anyone with even a cursory knowledge will know what he's saying rings depressingly true.

On the other hand, others - who claim no experience of the sector - confine themselves to ad hominem attacks which seem calculated to bully Winston into silence.

Here's 'Ewiggy':

Your fear and ignorance, WInston, shines through.

There's really nothing like constructive argument, and that was really nothing like etc etc.

Unlike Ewiggy, I know who Winston is; he's about as far from ignorant as possible, and frightened people don't stick their heads above the parapet like he has. He's desperately worried about these kids and the future of this country, that's all. Ewiggy apparently thinks everything is ticketyboo. Well, it's a point of view.

Today, The Daily Mail picks up where The Guardian left off, with more insights and stories. Lots of other media people interested, too, though I think he's going to lie low for a bit now.

Finally, the Orwell prize shortlist (he was longlisted, along with our PC Bloggs) is announced tonight. Fingers crossed for both of them.

UPDATE: WINSTON MADE THE SHORTLIST, BLOGGS DIDN'T.

John Humphrys' Eyes Open

2010-04-14T12:04:00.001+01:00

John Humphrys has been fronting a BBC Radio 4 Today programme investigation into which new laws have worked and which haven't during the Labour years.

This morning's report came from Cardiff, where he recently spent a Saturday night sampling our new cafe culture.

For overseas readers, this was Labour's attempt to take the British penchant for drinking and fighting and change it into a more relaxed, continental attitude to life by allowing pubs and clubs to open 24 hours a day.

The thinking was that the Spanish and French can stay up all night sipping rioja and ricard: why can't the Brits do the same with their Stella and Carling?

Listening to the programme, it was quite obvious that it has been a long time since John spent a Saturday out on the town.

He seems quite naiive about policing, too. At one point, a sergeant gave 'words of advice' to a man who was behaving aggressively.

Humphrys wondered why - since he was obviously drunk and disorderly - the man wasn't arrested for this offence.

Sergeant: 'If we arrested everyone who was drunk and disorderly we'd have no officers on the streets.'

It wasn't like that in the Wales of JH's youth; he wondered if the sergeant wasn't being a little 'timid' (in other words, ignoring the precise reason for the non-arrest and inventing one which, perhaps, fitted his own internal 'narrative' better).

It's not like he's a leading journalist and opinion-former, so I suppose it doesn't really matter that he has not the faintest idea what our cities and towns are now like.

Anyway, here's Inspector Gadget's take on 24-hour drinking (from Perverting the Course of Justice - we've sent a copy to John Humphrys this morning):

24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE
WE HEAR a lot about ‘booze Britain’ these days, but it’s not the booze which is the problem, it’s the people.
Most of us like a drink now and then. As a younger man, particularly when I was in the Army, I had a few beers and rolled back home drunk more than once, but I never smashed all the car mirrors off in the streets on the way back, or attacked anyone with a baseball bat, or told the police to f**k off. I still enjoy a pint from time to time, but I don’t get absolutely slaughtered and I don’t go out and smack people in the face and puke all over the pavement. I don’t drink-drive and I don’t beat up my wife or kids or neighbours. I don’t smash shop windows, or urinate in doorways, or use foul language at the top of my voice.
I’m nothing special: there are millions of people who don’t do any of these things, and you’re probably among them.
The problem is, there are also quite a lot of Britons who don’t feel like they’ve had a decent night out until they’ve ticked several of the above boxes, and had a kebab/KFC.
Of course, their behaviour is often appalling when they’re sober, but it’s far worse when they’re drunk, as whatever inhibitions or social polish they might have had are swept away on a tide of Stella Artois and blue, vodka-based pop.
There are people who say that it was ever thus, and point to Hogarth’s Gin Lane and the back streets of our port cities where sailors would get tanked up and fighting drunk after months at sea. But this new phenomenon is happening on our High Streets, at least three or four nights a week.
The protagonists are often young, and they have a lot of disposable income: they can’t afford to buy houses anymore so they all live with their parents way beyond when they used to. With no responsibilities, and with discount drink far cheaper than it ever was, why not go out and get hammered every night?
Into this poisonous cocktail the Government recently threw another ingredient – 24 hour licensing.
Not many places are open 24 hours, it’s true, but lots are now open much later than they were. I don’t care what the figures say, this has caused us huge problems. When the nightclubs used to shut at the same time, we could gear everything to that point. We would have a flurry of issues – the town centre fights, the robbing or bilking of taxi drivers, the drink-driving accidents, the people falling over and smacking their heads on the concrete etc – but at about 2.30am it would all start to die off. Now it carries on all the way through to 6am. Ask any front line cop, and they’ll tell you: broad daylight on a Sunday morning, getting towards the end of the shift, and they are still going to fights in the High Street. What’s going on?
The Government calls it the ‘Night Time Economy’ (NTE). This Orwellian phrase refers to those bars, clubs and other such venues operating at night in town centres. It is a nightmare of vomit, urine, chips and police officers being punched in the face, but that doesn’t square with the official vision of longer licensing and the NTE – where everyone meets up in cafés to share polenta and vine-ripened tomatoes, sips their five units of alcohol and chats about the issues of the day.
Again, I may have missed it but I don’t think any minister has gone on telly and admitted that the NTE licensing experiment has been a disaster. They don’t like to admit they’re wrong about much, do they? Instead, the pressure is on the police to find ways to deal with NTE crime and anti-social behaviour.
Launching an advertising campaign recently, Jacqui Smith said, ‘I am not prepared to tolerate alcohol-fuelled crime and disorder on our streets and this new campaign will challenge people to think twice about the serious consequences of losing control. It reinforces Government action already underway to deal with excessive drinking, including tougher sanctions for licensees who sell to young people, new powers for the police to disperse disruptive drinkers and better education and information for everyone.’
The Government’s input, then, is an advert, some ‘better education and information’ and the wildly misguided hope that the lunatics we arrest each weekend will somehow start to ‘think twice about the serious consequences of losing control’.
As for actually sorting it out, that’s down to us. Luckily, they are legislating to give us ‘new powers’.
The problem with politicians these days is that very few of them have actually ever done anything in the real world. They go from university, to jobs as MPs’ research assistants, to themselves becoming MPs and then Ministers. Being law-abiding types themselves (save for the odd run-in with cannabis), they actually believe that a ton of extra verbage on the statute books is all it takes. If only it were that simple.
The Government says irresponsible landlords who serve drunk people should be prosecuted, and that we should also identify the bar staff who served these idiots their booze. Which sounds great when you announce it at the despatch box in the House of Commons, or on Richard and Judy’s sofa, or in an exclusive interview with some newspaper political editor. It’s not so easy at midnight in our towns, when the streets are full of paralytically drunk yobs who are kicking off, smashing windows and fighting with us. We don’t have the time or the personnel to start checking CCTV to find out where they just came out of. Even if we did, and we went to speak to the manager of the venue, what’s he going to say? He’s going to say, no, we didn’t serve them, they came in pissed so we kicked them back out. So we spend however many hours reviewing the tapes to find all the previous venues they went to, and the managers there say, no, we didn’t serve them either, they were pissed when they came in here, too.
OK, so we grill the bar staff instead. We push our way into a club we think a given bozo has come from. There are 300 people in there, the ‘music’ is at about 140 decibels, the five barmaids are all Polish and hardly speak a word of English. Shouting to be heard, we’re trying to ask them if they served a man in a striped shirt with tattooed forearms and a gold earring, in a club containing about 200 men in striped shirts with tattooed forearms and gold earrings. Back on the street, meanwhile, a whole different group of drunks is now kicking the living s**t out of my officers.
This is the stuff of fantasy. It is ludicrous. It is dreamed up by people sitting in air conditioned rooms whose experience of modern drinking, I can only think, must be limited to nights out in country inns in the Cotswolds or metropolitan bars in London. In a trendy pub in Islington, there might be three dozen people sitting listening to jazz all night and if one of them later goes mad outside the 24 hour Tesco possibly you can pin something on the people who served him his last quart of pinot grigio. But these are not the places from which the trouble emanates.
The police can shut problem pubs, says the Government. Yep, we can. But it’s not quite as easy as it sounds when you say it to Andrew Marr and he’s nodding in agreement. I have shut a pub down. Once. But it was a really difficult thing to do, it took days of police time and it wasn’t easy to get it through at court. The licensees don’t just roll over, they put up a vigorous defence because it’s their livelihood you’re taking away. Plus, all it does is displace the problem. People don’t stop drinking and brawling just because their favourite bar has closed, after all.
I don’t know the full answer to the problem. I suspect no-one does. It probably involves all sorts of things, from improving attitudes to civility and behaviour from a very young age, to changing our drinking culture, to making booze harder and more expensive to buy (though this would penalise non-problem drinkers), to tougher enforcement of the basic laws against public drunkenness and violence.
This latter element of a wider solution is the one thing the police actually could do something about – after all, Ms Smith says that she has given us new powers to ‘disperse disruptive drinkers’. But this is another one straight from the la-la land school of public order: ‘Excuse me sir, can you put that bottle down and stop trying to blind that other man? We have new powers to disperse you, you see.’
Disperse them with who, Jacqui?
I know the Home Secretary says we have more police than ever, but how many of them are working Response? I know, too, that we have PCSOs now, and that they look a bit like police, but very few of them work beyond 9pm because it’s too dangerous (it’s not too dangerous for the public, note, but it is too dangerous for PCSOs, despite their stab vests and their radios). In the first few months of 24 hour licensing, we were given enormous amounts of centrally-funded extra money to put more bodies on the street – the overtime was great for the Sergeants and PCs. As a result, everywhere you turned there were police. Once that dried up, we were back to normal – and we really don’t have the numbers to do much more than control things to a just-about acceptable level.
So, what if we could do something to the figures, to make it look like things are better? If it’s not within our gift to stop the nations’ youth getting drunk and fighting, and it’s not, the only place left for us to go to, to get the reductions we need, is our bureaucrats.
If we arrest lots of people for relatively minor things, so we get lots of ‘detections’, we at least have some ammunition to use in our defence when people start squealing about NTE crime. Or if police statisticians start to look at definitions of crime, maybe we can shift things that would have been counted into areas that wouldn’t be?
For instance, someone is being aggressive and drunk in the street. We have two options. We can arrest him for being ‘drunk and disorderly’ or for one of the offences under the Public Order Act 1986 – sections 3, 4 and 5 of which are more commonly known as ‘Affray’, ‘Threatening Behaviour’ and ‘Disorderly Conduct’.
What’s the difference? The difference is that ‘drunk and disorderly’ is not a recordable crime. You are found in that state by a police officer, arrested and bound over to keep the peace at court the next day (or, more often, given a Penalty Notice for Disorder and sent on your way). It doesn’t show up on our figures. S5 POA is recordable, and does.
There is widespread anecdotal evidence of PCs being put under pressure to arrest for drunk and disorderly. Even if they arrest for S5 POA, it can later be changed to d&d – this is perfectly legitimate, no-one is doing anything technically wrong or illegal, but it does have the added benefit of making the NTE figures look a lot better than they actually are, doesn’t it?
I don’t even really blame senior officers if they are creating this pressure: the Government has said it wants to see reductions, so we have to provide them.
Whether it actually makes things better… well, who in authority really cares? As long as they aren’t getting stabbed in the kebab house, or having their car walked over at 3am, or being woken up by people fighting in their front garden – and they aren’t – then is there really a problem?

Shady URL

2010-04-13T17:11:00.004+01:00

is an amusing site which turns innocent urls into less innocent-sounding ones, and offers endless opportunities to terrify elderly parents or unsophisticated web-using friends.

http://www2.labour.org.uk/manifesto-splash (the Labour manifesto page) becomes http://5z8.info/craigslistblowjob_m9q2t_launchexe or the Harman-friendly http://5z8.info/russian-brides_v8d2i_hot-older-goats.mov.

http://www.conservatives.com/Video/Webcameron.aspx becomes
http://5z8.info/trojan_pxi or, if you prefer, http://5z8.info/manhunter_wbg.

http://www.nickclegg.com/ is http://5z8.info/REFINANCE-NOW_a2m7t_nazi (which doesn't sound all that far fetched, actually) or http://5z8.info/dogs-being-eaten_l6u2u_taliban-meetup. I wonder if Clegg would consider sharing power with the Taliban in the event of a hung Karzai?

Meanwhile, the onelook.com reverse dictionary is not funny, but very helpful.

Contact Wait Out, Wait On

2010-04-09T12:19:00.001+01:00

Yesterday should have seen the publication of Contact Wait Out (still showing April 8 on Amazon, this will change soon).

Due to circumstances beyond our control, it has been delayed 9again) and will appear some time in the autumn. We've pre-sold a large number of copies, and have written to all customers; if the email ends up in spam, apologies. (If you don't read this either, not sure what to do.)

The good news is, it will be a very good book when it is published.

Meantime, there are still a few copies of In Foreign Fields (hardback and paperback) knocking around. Here's a blog with the basic details of that book, and here's a free extract from our website. Still makes the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.

Tories Promise To Keep Books VAT-free

2010-04-09T09:58:00.000+01:00

... according to The Bookseller.
Actually, if you read the piece what Ed Vaisey says is that they 'have absolutely no plans' to put VAT on books.
I don't think that amounts to a promise; I'm just not sure whether it should be taken on its merits or read along the lines of 'I have absolutely no plans to invade Poland'.
I hope it's the former; I think VAT would kill publishing.

I Have No Idea Who Nurse Anne Is

2010-04-06T15:04:00.000+01:00

but I'd like to publish a book by her. (Actually, a TV programme would do it better).

This post is a cracker:

A while ago I explained that my trust was replacing real nurses with care assistants. And then they started replacing care assistants with untrained 17 year old 'nursing cadets' who I like to refer to as 'kids'. Most of these kids have no interest in nursing. They take the job because it pays a little more than McDonald's and because they like to play around in the nurse uniforms. The few that do have an interest in nursing would be wonderful to have in addition to a well-staffed ward. But instead they are all we have instead of a well-staffed ward.
6 years ago we had 4 or 5 registered nurses and 3 or 4 healthcare assistants on a day shift for a large ward.
4 years ago it went down to 3 staff nurses and 3 care assistants.
Now we have 2 staff nurses and two cadets per shift on a good day. That means that the only people who can handle most of what is going on are the staff nurses. The cadets can do very little outside of bed pans. And many are not willing to even do that.
...
The cadets call off sick constantly. We are talking at least twice a week. Weekend call offs are a given because teenagers like to get drunk. They walk up and down the ward with mobiles. They talk to the patients like idiots... When I get student nurses on the wards I need to use them to babysit the cadets rather than teach them how to be a nurse.

(The kids) have had NO training. The few in number qualified nurses are so on their knees that we cannot watch these kids or avoid delegating the basic care to them. It gives me nightmares... And the trust tells the world 'Oh yes indeed we are increasing our nursing numbers'. There should be some kind of law that says that an NHS trust is only allowed to use the term nurse when they are actually talking about qualified nurses. That would bring stats down....
...
We have had kids caught red-handed stealing drugs after asking for the keys to 'get some sudocrem'. We have had kids who have been found out to have a criminal record when they were once again arrested for assault. We have kids who are coming to work hungover. All sorts of alleged social problems stop these kids showing up for work much of the time. One kid's boyfriend showed up on the ward and got into a physical altercation with her. We have 16 year old pregnant kids who refuse to lift - the only thing that they are allowed to do anyway. Thank god for the one or two cadets who are planning on nursing or medical school. They are there for the right reasons and take pride in their work. The rest of them are crap.

We have 4 decent health care assistants left. Three of them handed in their notice along with a qualified nurse who has had enough. In their place, we care getting 4 of these cadets. The experienced health care assistant that is left has told the managers in no uncertain terms that she has had enough of the cadets and is refusing to work with them from now on. The qualified nurses feel the same.

One of our qualified nurses was the sole RN for 30 beds with 2 cadets on a monday morning. It was hell on and she was ringing and ringing and begging for more help. They kept sending her more cadets and acting like the nurse would be fine as long as she had a 'few more sets of hands'. This is how badly management devalues nurses. They think that untrained chavs can do the job and help the nurses. The qualified nurse broke down completely and resigned. And she is getting replaced with a cadet.

Odds And Sods

2010-04-02T16:21:00.006+01:00

This week we pulped £65,000-worth of stock. It was a wrench, but there comes a point when you have to accept that the remaining 5,000 copies of Road Trip To Hell* (to name one of the titles) are not going to sell and are just costing you money (via storage)*. Knowing our luck, Hughsie will be kidnapped by the Taliban and decapitated live on telly during his next visit to Afghanistan, and we'll have to reprint. Still, if we make it a martyrdom edition it will probably sell well.

Sadly**, for some reason, Gordon isn't planning to bail out indie publishers with a £400m book scrappage scheme. Apparently, the car version has 'saved 4,000 jobs' in the motor trade. I'm no economist, but does this mean these jobs cost £100,000 each? And if so, is that a good deal? Wouldn't it have been better to give 4,000 people grants to start new businesses? Plus, since we don't actually make any British cars here any more (we tried, we were rubbish), hasn't at least some of the money gone abroad? And what about all the jobbing mechanics and little garages who would have been making money out of keeping the (traded-in) old bangers on the road? Hasn't the 'stimulus' adversely affected them?

Perhaps we can get some Kenyan kids to help out? If it's good enough for the Bristol Old Vic (thanks to Hugh Hunter, author of the forthcoming Our Man In Orlando for sending us the clip):

Incidentally, if you're wondering who to vote for in the election, when it's eventually called, Party Matcher is helpful.

This made us chuckle (you wonder how):

Finally, this:

*We kept a few copies, so you can still buy one if you like (and it is a good read, actually - free extract here.)

**Not really sad about this: if you publish books people don't want to buy, it's your problem.

Simon Singh, Hero Of Free Speech; plus Dalrymple In The Guardian

2010-04-01T13:50:00.001+01:00

It has cost Simon Singh £200,000, but he has overturned Mr Justice 'Nightjack' Eady's mad ruling on his defence to a libel action. Singh wrote in The Guardian that claims that chiropractic could treat certain childhood conditions including colic and asthma lacked evidence.

Absurdly, the British Chiroptractic Association sued him for this (thus ensuring that everyone now knows what he wrote).

Even more absurdly, Eady ruled that Singh was not entitled to the libel defence of fair comment because his article was a statement of fact, rather than opinion.

Bit odd: it seems to me that Signh's opinion was that there was no evidence, and that the BCA's opinion was that there was.

Anyway, thanks to the Court of Appeal, Singh can now claim fair comment. Lesser men would have given in.

Theodore Dalrymple's latest (non Monday Books) title, The New Vichy Syndrome is reviewed quite positively in The Guardian by Steven Poole. I think Poole identifies the only real weakness in Dalrymple's writing - a slight (though perhaps inevitable) tendency to generalisation.

The good doctor is dismissed in the same newspaper by one Lynsey Hanley as a 'professional cynic' who 'never fail(s) to read the weakest motives into any individual action and make one feel as though life is wasted on those who don't know the one correct way in which to live.' This is lazy nonsense - akin to the Times review of Second Opinion, which accused Dalrymple of driving through poor areas in his (non-existent) BMW, disliking his patients. Dalrymple is not 'a professional cynic', unless it is cynical - for instance - to criticise men who drag their partners to the tops of staircases and hurl them back down, in order to procure miscarriages. (If it is, sign me up.) If it is 'cynical' to read into such individual actions 'the weakest of motives' , or to suggest that this is not the way to lives one's life, then sign me up all over again.

By the way, there are free extracts from Second Opinion and Not With A Bang But A Whimper at the links, and we send both books out worldwide with no additional postage charge (just pay via our website).

Gadget in The Sun

2010-03-30T11:04:00.002+01:00

The Sun's longstanding crime reporter Mike Sullivan (who I know a little from years ago) is obviously a reader of Gadget's blog, acknowledging him as the source for this story. It has always amazed me that more journalists don't beat a path to the Inspector's door; it's not like rewriting press releases is more satisfying or interesting, or their readers wouldn't be interested in this stuff. I know we've been banging on about it for years now, but the time the cops (and all other public servants) spend filling out these forms, just to feed the bureaucratic machine, is time they're not spending doing their jobs. And it's time we're all paying for.

Unfortunately, Charles Moore isn't a Gadget reader, if this piece from his Spectator's Notes in the latest Speccie is anything to go on:

I really like Charles' writing, though he rambles on a bit too much about Catholicism and vicarages; this is a rare lapse of common sense, for the reasons Gadget enumerates.

Finally, the iSquared debate on the future of news is very interesting (we think). I'll be handing over my two quid a week to Murdoch - I wonder who else will?

It's Rather Like Trying To Get An Egg Back Once You've Broken It

2010-03-28T13:19:00.000+01:00

There's a 20-minute Theodore Dalrymple interview on the US Pajamas Media site to promote his new (non Monday Books title) The New Vichy Syndrome. He's big on the problems, not so hot on solutions; but then, as he says, it's a bit like trying to rebuild a broken egg. It all ends a little ominously: 'What I rather fear,' he says, 'given our past history, is that, if there were a really severe crisis in Europe then very authoritarian solutions might be tried.'

Charles Moore says much the same thing as Dalrymple (in respect of the financial state we're in, and where it might lead) in Saturday's Daily Telegraph.

Samir Raheem wrote an interesting piece in Saturday's Telegraph, too; Apoca-lit Now discusses the future of books and publishing and is worth reading.

Two Monday Books Authors Listed For Orwell Prize

2010-03-24T21:30:00.001Z

WPC E E Bloggs makes this year's blog/journalism Orwell Prize longlist, having missed out last year. Her blog is here and there's a free extract from the excellent Diary of an On-Call Girl here. (You can buy the book itself here, if you like.) Sometime between now and 2015 we plan to publish the follow-up. We'll keep you posted.

Care home/supported housing worker Winston Smith - named after George Orwell's most famous character, obviously - also makes the longlist. He's one of our authors-in-waiting, in that we're currently editing his book and expect to publish it this autumn. You can read his blog here, though. Some people don't get it - they think he's attacking the kids, when really he's attacking the system (OK, and some of the kids). The stories in the book would make your hair curl.

We submitted Theodore Dalrymple's Second Opinion, but he doesn't make the cut. It's a collection of previously published work, which may explain why.

We tried to persuade Inspector Gadget to enter, but after what happened to Nightjack last year, he was a little gun shy.

Inspector Gadget Goes Off Sick

2010-03-23T12:26:00.001Z

Actually, he doesn't. But he does explain what happened after Gordon Brown promised to cut police bureaucracy in 2007, and uses the paperwork required to be off sick by way of illustration. (Would it amaze you to learn that, actually, police bureaucracy increased?)

PC Bloggs had interesting points to make on rape recently: she appeared on C4 News wearing a fetching hoodie, and also wrote this piece for the C4 news website.

The always excellent Nurse Anne reveals that they're still hiring bureaucrats hand over fist in her hospital - which chimes with the latest Theodore Dalrymple piece in City Journal:

On March 2, the Guardian reported that the ex-minister, now Lord Warner, said that while spending on Britain’s National Health Service had increased by 60 percent under the Labour government, its output had decreased by 4 percent.

How they get away with this is literally beyond me.

Also of interest from the US: City Journal on Chicago’s Real Crime Story and Mark Steyn in National Review on big government and the decline of America.

Finally, two pieces of obscure (but excellent) 1970s soul. The first is a great Unique Blend track; the second is by Bileo. I understand that the England World Cup squad have no official song this year; someone ought to buy the rights to You Can Win and re-issue it.

On The Edge

2010-03-22T10:57:00.003Z

We've been looking for a while for a follow-up book to Frank Chalk's excellent It's Your Time You're Wasting (free extract here), and we think we have found it in On The Edge.

It's the story of a year in the life of young English teacher Charlie Carroll - a year in which he jacked in his cosy, comfy job and went round some of the UK's toughest schools, working as a supply teacher and living in a VW camper van.

Primarily, he wanted to find out why so many newly qualified teachers leave their profession within a few years of qualifying.

The behaviour of some kids in some schools provided him with an answer.

It's a shocking, interesting and funny insight into life in the sort of schools to which children are condemned, not sent to learn.

It's also a powerful indictment - by a man who believes wholeheartedly in state education, and gets a huge kick out of teaching - of the costly bureaucratic tragedy that British education, for too many poor families, has become.

It's out in September (though you can pre-order now to get your copy earlier in the summer), and here's the AI cover - comments more than welcome!

Morons With Signs

2010-03-12T17:31:00.000Z

There are some great sites on the net. I'm not sure who has the time to collate Morons With Signs. I'm just glad they do:

Half A Beer Is Better Than No Beer At All

2010-03-09T14:25:00.001Z

The Bookseller and Nielsen both report book sales are down, with non-fiction particularly hard hit. Looks like I picked the wrong day to give up smoking.

This is a surprisingly interesting question.

Two men in a pub. One orders a Paulaner. The waitress brings a Staropramen by mistake. She is about to take it away and replace it, when he offers to pay half-price for it to save the cost of throwing it away.

What decision should she make? Accept the offer and avoid the wastage, or bring a new beer and charge full price?

The answer - or at least, some thoughts on it - is at the excellent 'Knowing and Making' blog.

I spent Sunday at a place I'd never been to before and had scarcely even heard of: Painswick, in Gloucestershire. One of the most beautiful and unspoilt towns in England - I'm not sure how I'd missed it. You should go. Lots of pictures here at www.geograph.co.uk, but I particularly liked the churchyard:

Bits and Bobs

2010-03-04T15:37:00.007Z

I won't bore you with news of bookstores closing here and in Ireland.

Instead, I'll just bore you.

I'd never heard of Abby Sunderland, but here's an online diary, updated from somewhere in the middle of the ocean, detailing her attempt to become the youngest person ever to sail solo round the world.

Not all 16-year-olds have Abby's get up and go (I certainly didn't). Here in the Times, Harriet Sergeant talks about the tragic unemployability of many British kids, and offers a fascinating contrast with a school in Harlem, where most of the children are from broken homes and many have a father in jail.

Sergeant is a really good writer, I think (though she's slightly preaching to the choir I admit). Here she is in the Sunday Times on the unsackability of (particularly) senior people in the public sector. Up to 1,200 people lost their lives in the Stafford NHS disaster - how many managers were fired? (And why isn't Stephen Fry tweeting about how great our system is?)

And here she is in action at a recent Intelligence Squared debate on the NHS. Well worth watching.

If you like old books (I do) there are some amazing pictures of covers and plates here at the bibliodyssey blog. Almost as interesting are the links on the sidebar.

Finally, here's a guy whose whole schtick is to place his camera down, click it on a two-second delay and see how far he can run away before the picture is taken.

Odd.

Stuff

2010-03-02T13:24:00.003Z

Dalrymple on whether the Yorkshire Ripper should ever be allowed out of jail/hospital here in the Times. (The Man from Delmonte he say 'No'.)

Lots of comments underneath, my favourite of which comes from 'Tone R': 'Would a parole board have to question each of his individual personalities?'

(Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son is a great book on the Ripper, by the way.)

More Dalrymple here in New English Review on Richard Dawkins, allegations of 'censorship' and the bizarre aggression of some of the lunatics who comment on blogs.

Alastair Campbell on Twitter: 'Watching dance of NW3 private school yummymummy 4by4s. would their lives not be better using local schools? Planet saving too'

I'm sure he strongly advised Tony and Cherie not to send their children halfway across London to the school rather than to the local Islington comp. Because if he hadn't, he'd be a hypocrite.

We're slowly getting to grips with Twitter, and think it could be an excellent marketing tool. It's also very good for reminding you of little things you'd forgotten, like this from yesterday: 'in 2000, Mandelson called Brigade of Guards "chinless wonders"; 63 members of Household Divn have died in Afg/Iraq.'

That's Peter Mandelson who was twice thrown out of the Cabinet, by the way, and who is still the key public face of the Labour Party.

Mark Steyn is a great writer. Here's a piece from the Orange County Register on the Greek situation and demographics which is concerning to say the least.

Finally, Bad e-fits from Angry People In Local Newspapers.

Better Sex With This Here

2010-02-26T10:05:00.008Z

Our regular reader will know that we recently signed up to Twitter - this despite not really understanding what Twitter is, or why people use it. It was all at the prompting of our enthusiastic young intern, Tim.

This morning I arrive in the office to find that we are 'tweeting' to anyone who cares to know that we are 'having better sex and longer with this here'. We don't explain what 'this here' might be, which is galling - a small part of me would like to know.

I also discover that we have sent out 'DMs' suggesting that we are '24, female and horny' and inviting interested parties - roughly 50 per cent of the adult population, I assume - to contact us via something called Windows Messenger. Until now, I didn't even know what a DM was. You live and learn.

I think it might have come about because I received a 'tweet' from Harriet Harman yesterday asking if 'this' was me. Being stupid, I clicked on the link to find out what the 'this' was that the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party was on about. Aaaarrgghh.

Anyway, I'd like to make clear that suggestions that anyone at Monday Books is having sex of any kind, be it longer and better or shorter and worse, are wholly false. I also don't know any horny 24-year-old females. But I am prepared to keep digging until I find them.

Meanwhile, PC Ellie Bloggs reveals that she was at the Theodore Dalrymple/Daniel Hannan event. (I hadn't mentioned this in case she didn't want it known.) Where she talks about me accidentally revealing her name, she may be referring to an incident (incidents, actually) when we met lots of TV types to discuss turning her book* into a sitcom. I kept mentioning her first name, the the point where it progressed through stupid, to embarrassing, to giggle-inducing. Luckily, I think the TV types thought it was all part of a clever misinformation strategy. (* Free extract here.)

Alice Azania-Jarvis (Indie journo) has also mentioned the event in her diary. I don't think it's fair to describe Dan Hannan as having 'snapped' at her. I'll have to listen to the tape. Mind you, she doesn't even seem to know what day of the week it was.

On an unrelated note, while sending out all those obscene twitterings last night, I also had one eye on the telly. I'd recorded Evan Davies' programme The Day The Immigrants Left, which examined the oft-repeated line that 'they' are 'coming over here taking our jobs'. Davies - the best presenter on the BBC, I think - went to Wisbech and tried to persuade unemployed Britons to work as (among other things) asparagus pickers and potato boxers. At the end of the show, despite lots of Jim Royle talk about grafting, none of the Brits was kept on, because they were lazy, chippy and unreliable, where the foreign workers were keen, happy to have jobs and worked like Trojans.

In the case of the asparagus pickers, who were paid by results, the British workers collected £25 or £35-worth of spears, which meant the farmer had to supplement their wages (or else would have been paying them below the minimum wage). Meanwhile, an eastern European chap had recently picked £150-odd worth in the same time.

Of the three potato boxers, two showed up late, but at least they showed up. The third sent a text at midnight saying he'd just got in, felt poorly and wouldn't be taking up the offer of work. He was 26 years old, living with his mother and spent his day playing computer games. He had been unemployed for five years and said he 'shied away' from boring jobs. I cannot believe that anyone could watch this programme and think this is acceptable, or even sane. The welfare state was not designed to keep able-bodied young men sitting on their backsides because the available work is not interesting.

The programme is available at BBC iPlayer and is well worth watching if you missed it. (One quibble. The foreign workers were clearly excellent, and were keeping local businesses going which would otherwise have folded. However, the headmistress of a local primary school where [from memory] a third of the children were foreign, and eight languages were spoken, and foreign-language teachers had had to be brought in at some cost, said that this had improved her school. I just can't see how this can be the case.)

Dalrymple and Hannan Wrap Up

2010-02-25T09:58:00.001Z

I have a condition called Noshowophobia - the fear that if you hold an event (or a party) no-one will show up, because they all secretly hate you.

It's not entirely rooted in insanity. Before Monday Books, I was a partner in a sports management business. Among our clients was Martin Johnson, and, in 2001, after Johnno led the thrilling but ultimately unsuccessful Lions Tour to Australia (the Nathan Grey elbow/Richard Hill's chin interface in the second test cost us the series), I ghostwrote his book of the tour. We arranged a small tour of bookshops and at the Waterstone's in Oxford, the grand total of two people turned up.

I was mortified (although Martin has almost no ego in these sorts of things, and found it amusing rather than embarrassing or annoying).

Anyway, memories of that night stalked me on Tuesday as we put on our Evening with Theodore Dalrymple, chaired by Dan Hannan MEP.

The clock ticked round to 7pm, our hall in Chelsea remained empty and I got more and more nervous.

In the end, of course, the place was heaving - how could it not, with two names like that on the door?

Around 90 people were entertained to an hour and a half of Dalrymple and Hannan discussing the NHS, heroin, prison doctoring, football and pop music.

Many were long-time Dalrymple fans who had never had the chance to see and hear him in person.

Like many others, they imagined a grumpy and severe old man with unbending views on morality and politics.

In fact, Dalrymple is a very warm and amusing man of not very advanced years (he retired very early from medicine) with a strong line in self-deprecation.

As always, he was ready to admit to being good at identifying problems, but not so good at the solutions - other than that less bureaucracy would be a start. As he pointed out (in respect of the NHS), 400,00 people have been added to the NHS payroll since 1997 (one for every 150 of us, roughly speaking), and yet we have scandals like Mid Staffs happening. How?

Dan Hannan's chairmanship of the event was superb, and took a great deal of weight off our shoulders.

We recorded the whole thing and will be sending it to the guys at the Skeptical Doctor website so they can stick it up. We don't have - or have but don't understand - the facility to host sound on here.

Hannan has since blogged about the event, as has the Telegraph journalist Ed West, who was also there. The Conservative blogger Behind Blue Eyes has also produced a write-up, as have fellow bloggers Andrea Zuvich and Gavin Orland. (We'd have been happy to have more bloggers there, by the way; anyone interested in attending future similar events should just drop us an email. Anonymity assured, of course.)

As always, there are free extracts from the two Dalrymple books we've published so far here and here, and we ship them worldwide with no postal charges.

Trying To Deal With Easyjet When I Should Be Working

2010-02-22T19:14:00.007Z

I recently booked a return flight with easyjet from Luton to Geneva for a short trip in March.

Today, I receive an email telling me that the outbound flight has been cancelled.

We would like to offer you one of the following in accordance with our obligations under EC Regulation 261/2004, they say. Please click here to see the different options offered to you.

Irritating, but it's not a major problem: I can shift the whole trip forward one day - I'll go a day earlier and return a day earlier.

Simple.

So I 'click here' and receive... no different options.

Instead, I get this:

Does the new flight time suit you?

Yes, it does. I am happy with the new flight time.

No, it does not. I would like to see other options.

Since there is no 'new flight time', I can hardly say it suits me, so I click ‘No, it does not. I would like to see other options.’

The other options are:

What would you like to do with your flight? (Please note that you can only select one option and your decision is final)

Get a credit file

A free transfer

It's not obvious what either a 'credit file' or a 'free transfer' are, but I click the latter on the basis that it probably gives you the option to change your flights.

It does; it also offers you the chance the change the return leg.

Simple, again.

Unfortunately, while I can easily click the change my now-cancelled outbound flight, there is no option to change my return flight. This is not really on: I'd be a day longer in France than I want to be.

There's a little bit of spiel telling me that if I'm having problems, I should email customer services.

I go to the link.

Despite the fact that I am logged in to Easyjet using my customer account, it won't let me click through to customer services.

I need to reinput my login details.

I can't remember my password, but that's not a problem because it won't let me enter my email address anyway.

Apparently, my email address is already on the system (I know) but when I click the 'can't remember my passowrd button it refuses to accept the request and says something about my email address being in an unacceptable format. (That’s the same email address they just used to email me the fact that they had cancelled my flight.)

OK, so I’ll call customer services.

Where’s the number? Nowhere on the easyjet website as far as I can see, so I google it and eventually get it.

I spend the next 45 minutes hanging on, listening to some truly awful music on a loop, and a dead voice telling me that they are (they are) experiencing long delays and are endeavouring to answer my call. The most enraging part comes where, every 30 seconds, the emotionless woman tells me: ‘If you would like an answer to your question, please go to easyjet.com where you can submit an email.’

If I would like answer? As opposed to if I am just hanging on here for fun?

Eventually, I get through to a nice young man with an almost impenetrable accent (Russian, I think) who tells me (in terms) that he cannot log into my account because it is locked for 15 minutes, that I can try emailing customer services if I want but he can’t guarantee that I’ll get a response before I actually fly (in March) and that I should call back tomorrow when customer services are less busy.

Yours, Frustrated of Leicestershire.

PS I also hate Blogger at the moment. It keeps changing all my fonts and messing my rambling nonsense around. We're going to change to Wordpress I think.

PPS UPDATE - Easyjet have refunded my original dosh. Great people!

Questions

2010-02-20T12:22:00.002Z

Working on our forthcoming title Sick Notes, I need to find the correct definition for 'informed consent' and I uncover this little scandal (on p3 of the NHS document Consent - What You Have A Right To Expect):
Fathers, married or unmarried, automatically have parental responsibility for their children (ie the right to consent on their behalf to medical procedures).
Mothers, however, only have parental responsibility if they were married to the father when the child was conceived or born, or if they got married to him later.
Unmarried mothers do not automatically have parental responsibility for their child, but a court order or a ‘parental responsibility agreement’ can give it to them.
How has Harriet Harman missed this glaring example of inequality? What is to be done?

On an unrelated note, a slightly weird Dutch politician called Geert Wilders is on trial in the Netherlands for the equally odd crime of insulting Islam, and has been forbidden from calling 15 witnesses in his defence. This appears to be because they might exonerate him.
Why are the BBC (to name but one major mainstream news organisation) not following the trial closely?
It's not because they aren't interested in Dutch affairs (the news front page currently reports the political fallout there over Afghanistan), or because they don't have space - though I suppose they could hardly be expected to drop their front page story revealing the killer of Archie Mitchell in EastEnders in favour of the latest in the Wilders case. It's not because they don't have the staff to spare, given that they sent more people to the Winter Olympics than the country sent competitors.
It's not just the BBC, mind you.
As far as I can see, The Telegraph hasn't mentioned the story for weeks, though its website helpfully carries a video identifying key suspects in the Albert Square slaying.
The Guardian, too, doesn't seem interested in the issues raised by the trial, though they do carry a big piece about the momentous Mitchell revelations, EastEnders in general (and the news that Steve's motorbike is out of action in Emmerdale).
To be fair, The Times does have a small piece of 539 words, as against the 552 words it devotes to revealing Archie's murder to be someone called Stacey.
In fact, you almost have to go to Canada to read about Wilders, which is odd. Why?

Finally, courtesy of David Thompson, here's a great little film of Washingtonians dealing with their recent snow.

In Times Of Universal Deceit...

2010-02-18T12:40:00.001Z

We've just signed up Winston Smith to produce a book for us later this year. It's another of our inside-story-from-the-front-line books - this time about the terrible state of some of our 'care' homes and 'supported housing' projects. Visit his blog to get more of an idea.

He gets a lot of really rabid abuse in his comments, most of which he doesn't publish. Telling the truth is a revolutionary act, I guess. (The book will actually be the work of two people with similar experiences from different ends of the country.)

We're publishers, not economists, but even we have been saying for some years now that the country is screwed. Until today, we could at least relax in the knowledge that Greece was screweder. Not any more, sadly. Basically, the government and their tame economists were predicting a surplus (of tax receipts over expenditure) of £2.6bn in January - not much more than spit in the Pacific, but still. It turns out that in fact we registered a deficit of £4.3bn - the first time we've ever had a deficit in January. The FT's excellent Alphaville blog explains why this could be a very bad thing indeed. (Don't worry, though - we're still 'best placed to come out of recession' / 'roaring ahead at 0.1% growth'.)

Back to Winston Smith. He takes his name, of course, from the hero of Orwell's 1984 (which everyone should read and re-read from the age of 10). Just to cheer you up a bit further, here are the 10 Most Depressing Quotes From 1984.

Holiday Reading

2010-02-15T12:55:00.003Z

Just back after a week away, during which I managed to make a small indentation in the enormous pile of books I have on my to-read pile.
I finished Bite The Hand That Feeds You by Henry Fairlie, and also the late, great Frank Johnson's Best Seat In The House.
Fairlie - he coined the term 'The Establishment' in the 1950s - is pricey at £25, but is an interesting look at the politics of the period. The Johnson book is a collection of some of his best Spectator pieces and is, as you'd imagine if you ever read him, very funny indeed.
I started David Willetts' The Pinch, which suggests that the Baby Boom generation has royally screwed this country. As a post-Baby Boomer, I naturally agree.
We've just signed contracts with a teacher who will reveal what it's like in some of Britain's worst schools. Frank Chalk did this way back when we started, but the new book is based on a wider experience of more schools throughout the UK - the author left his cosy job in a decent comprehensive and spent a year working as a supply in some very challenging places. Unlike Chalk, he'll be writing under his own name, so we expect some good publicity and (I hope) decent sales when it comes out later this year.
I think the state of the education system is the single most important issue facing the country, and am very interested in Toby Young's ongoing efforts and also in the Tory proposals to introduce 'Swedish-style' schools here. I do worry slightly about Michael Gove. In a discussion between him and Chris Woodhead in the latest Standpoint, there is the following exchange:

Chris Woodhead: Cogita is a profit-making organisation. Our schools by and large are oversubscribed so in terms of the challenge of persuading people that it is a good idea to send their children to them, we've met that challenge. In terms of the taxpayer, my view is that the money that you Secretaries of State for Schools spend is given to you by parents and I don't see why you should not give the parents who want it the money back. Say you don't have to cash it just in a state school, but you can cash it also in a private school, and top it up.

Michael Gove: That's another area where I disagree.

CW: I don't know why philosophically, as a Conservative, you think that it is wrong for parents who wish to forgo their holiday or new car, to spend their money on their child's education.

MG: This is probably the area where I don't know what I am. Am I shockingly left-wing or am I being infected by the spirit of John Rawls?

Three months out from an election, if he doesn't know what he is we're in trouble!

Finally, we still have a small number of tickets available for our Theodore Dalrymple evening in Chelsea on Tuesday February 23. Call on 01455 221752 to order or for more info.

Monday Books Joins The 21st Century (Only Ten Years After Everyone Else)

2010-02-04T17:36:00.011Z

We've just taken on a new intern, which as far as I can see is essentially legal slave labour, except you have to let them go home at night.
He's very young and very keen and best of all he's free*! He's with us for three months and I hope that one day, when he achieves great things in publishing or some other area of commerce, he'll remember who gave him his first big break.
The first thing he said was, 'I can't believe you're not on Twitter and Facebook... do you want me to get you on there?'
Actually, we are on Facebook - we just don't really know how to work it. And in the merest jiffy, we were also on Twitter.
As I write, we have 15 followers. I'm not sure if this is good, or bad, or why they are following us. It's all a bit of a mystery.
If you want to follow us - though why you should I'm not entirely sure - you can do so here http://twitter.com/MondayBooks

* I say free, we bung him a few quid. Minimum wageish.

Theodore Dalrymple Event Update

2010-02-01T13:09:00.000Z

We've had a very good response to the above event (with Daniel Hannan asking the questions) in Chelsea later this month. One man called from Australia to book two tickets (though he's not flying over specially...).
There are some seats still available: book here (scroll down to the bottom of the page) or call 01455 221752 for more information.

Meanwhile, we're heads down in the literally incredible bureaucracy of the NHS as we plough through Sick Notes, our forthcoming book about life as a GP (by the award-winning medical journalist, and GP, Dr Tony Copperfield). QOF points, patient care episodes, indicative prescribing budgets... there must be easier ways to run a health service, surely.

Theodore Dalrymple In Conversation With Daniel Hannan

2010-01-25T10:15:00.004Z

We've arranged an evening with Theodore Dalrymple in London on February 23.
The Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan has very kindly agreed to act as interlocutor on the night.
Details are as follows:
When: 7.30-9.30pm, Tuesday February 23, 2010.
Where: Kensington, Chelsea & Fulham Conservative Association, 1a Chelsea Manor Street, London SW3 5RP.
The format will include an opportunity to put questions from the floor to Dalrymple.
Tickets are priced at £16.50 each; this includes a free copy of Not With A Bang But A Whimper (normal RRP £14.99) with each order, plus £1.50 postage and packing.
They are only available from us via this link (scroll down to the bottom) or via telephone on 01455 221752.
They are strictly limited and available on a first come, first served basis.
Profits after costs will go to the Haiti Disaster Appeal.

Stuff Happens

2010-01-22T17:47:00.002Z

We recently reprinted Perverting the Course of Justice (which just missed the cut in the list of 10 books which screwed up the world).
Because of the tougher economic climate we cut back on the run, ordering 3,000 copies where two years ago we'd have ordered 10,000.
Of course, this pushes the unit price up, to 60p apiece (say) instead of 45p. To further cut costs, we didn't stick ads for other titles on the inside covers, and we also didn't emboss the title (embossing is where the cover text or image is raised by stamping the reverse of the cover during the manufacturing process).
Then we found that the printers had inadvertently inserted a section from some historical novelor other into the middle of around 100 copies of the book. Unfortunately, a small number had escaped into the retail ecosystem; if you happen to get one, please return it to the retailer. (You might find it actually improves the narrative.)
These things happen. In fact, using this great online Sod's Law calculator (link fixed - sorry!), I was surprised to find that there was actually a 24% chance of it happening.

Asda's Big Read

2010-01-19T11:27:00.001Z

Literary agents are struggling, according to Robert McCrum in The Guardian.

Meanwhile, there's a very interesting piece here in the Daily Telegraph by James Hall, looking at two things - the new Channel 4 show The Book Club and Asda's new 'Big Read' campaign.

Asda are making available lots of classics, such as Lord of the Flies, Wind in the Willows and Jane Eyre at £3 a pop:

Dewi Williams, the snappily-titled ‘papershop category marketing manager’ at Asda, said: “The Big Read campaign is reducing the cost of these classic books to encourage children big and small to indulge in classic literature before it literally dies out.”

Asda’s gloomy prognosis is based on some quite alarming research, which involved interviews with 100 children and 2,000 parents. The supermarket found that 17% of children think Fagin is a Manchester United footballer and 40% think Moby Dick is a pop star. Meanwhile 60% of children have never heard of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea, while 25% think it is a song by The Beatles and 10% think it is the title of Simon Cowell’s autobiography. Almost 30% have read Harry Potter but just 3% have read Of Mice And Men. Conversely 50% can name David Beckham’s autobiography (My Side).

I'm not sure what's more surprising - that 17% of the kids couldn't name the Man U side (the survey must have been carried out in Manchester), or that 3% have read Steinbeck. Anyway, good on Asda but, much as I really would like to be proven wrong (again), I can't see very many modern youngsters wanting to read Jules Verne. Andy Stanton (who is brilliant, by the way), that's a different story.

The Latest From Framley

2010-01-15T14:08:00.006Z

The City of Houston* is having more problems with its forensic science services. I mention this because our recent book When Science Goes Wrong by the distinguished neuroscientist Simon LeVay contains a fascinating (and slightly chilling) chapter about the arrest and jailing in Houston of an innocent man accused of rape.

Despite a large amount of exculpatory evidence, Josiah Sutton was convicted on the basis of flawed DNA tests. It certainly gave me pause for thought, anyway. (As always, there's a free extract from the book at the above link.)

As an aside, we almost had the book printed in China, but stayed in the UK. That may have been a sensible decision (unusually for us) if this businessman's oriental experience is anything to go by.

This is an interesting and quite concerning story about pensions and public services in the States.

And the Framley Examiner's latest edition is out now. They seem to have missed the DNA/pensions deficit story somehow.

*By the way, these guys were from Houston. Is this the best soul record you've never heard of?

The lead singer was called George Brown. What a voice.

An Astonishing And Terrifying Story Of Wrongful Arrest

2010-01-11T10:39:00.002Z

In Wasting Police Time, we tell the tale (among many others) of the cops arresting a man for threatening someone with a lemon.

In Perverting the Course of Justice, it's 10-year-old kids nicked for stealing crisps from their friends and police operations to seize CCTV of a youth who told a young girl there was no such thing as Santa.

In Diary of an On-Call Girl, Bloggs is forever attending 'hate crimes' that aren't and 'domestics' which are either imaginary or six of one drunk and half a dozen of the other.

So nothing the modern British police do should surprise us. But this did. It's almost beyond belief (and foreign readers, particularly, will goggle at it).

What is happening to this country? I have discussed this sort of thing many times with Gadget, Copperfield, Bloggs and other frontline police. Largely, they hate this kind of rubbish as much as the rest of us.

The only solution, as far as I can see, is locally elected and accountable police chiefs. The powers-that-be don't like the sound of this, and are instead going the other way, to huge, remote, mega-forces. But until we have the opportunity to kick out the people who sanction arrests like that in the Telegraph story above, I can't see how they won't continue (and grow).

Meanwhile, advances are down and agents are in trouble, according to The Bookseller; the same publication reports that e-readers are not enjoying the best of times either.

Finally, there's a great piece here at the Guardian by Andrew Anthony about Pol Pot, the horrors of Communism and the strange ability/desire of some people not to see the blindingly obvious.

Friday Musings

2010-01-08T11:30:00.005Z

The cricket was good, wasn't it? I do love a good draw. The Guardian's OBO coverag e was awesome, as usual.

The value of UK High Street book sales was down by 7% year on year in 2009, according to the Daily Telegraph. Given that selling prices were static and costs were up, you don't need to be Paul Krugman or the ghost of Hayek to see the problems, but the internet is taking up some of that loss. I hate to say it, not only because it means people will lost their jobs but also because I love bookshops, but I can't see a future for them. This is very worrying.

It's early days, but Gadget's Perverting The Course Of Justice is our surprise best-seller of the first week of January. Helped, I suspect, by the Trevor Kavanagh plug in The Sun, he's recently been talking to the BBC about policing and that will probably help, too.

The sales of Dalrymple's Second Opinion ticked up nicely after his appearance on BBC Radio 5 Live last week, also. He has a nicely-written article about the financial crash afflicting us all here at the New English Review. The Skeptical Doctor website collates most of what he writes, and is well worth a visit for those who are interested.

For foreign visitors - and we have a surprising number - we send Dalrymple's titles overseas with no postal charge. In the case of the US, this saves you £6.03 (for Second Opinion).

Talking of visitors to the blog, among the last 100 we have had people from:

Rockland, Ontario

Ottawa, Ontario

Vancouver, British Columbia

Sherwood Park, Alberta

Windsor, Nova Scotia

Washington DC

Isle Of Palms, South Carolina

San Antonio and Frisco, Texas

Madison, Wisconsin

Royersford, Pennsylvania

Casero Derramador, Spain

Zurich

Akershus, Norway

Stanley, Falkland Islands

Yuen Long, Hong Kong

Auckland

Sydney

Bray, Co Wicklow.

Hello to you all.

Specific servers include people from the Houses of Parliament (hello, Gordon), various universities (including Oxford, Cambridge and UCL, where we seem to have a fan who visits the blog six or seven times a day), a number of police forces and what seems to be an office in the CIA. Bizarre.

Finally, lots of visitors outclicked on the northern soul youtube links, so here's one from Ray Pollard. The Drifter was a classic tune at the fabled Stafford allnighters of the mid-1980s, where mid-tempo tunes and beat ballads were played alongside the more, er, frenetic material traditionally associated with the genre.

Pollard lost an arm in the Korean war, tried his remaining hand at singing and got pretty much nowhere. Given that he could sing the likes of Frank Sinatra into a cocked hat, this seems cruel. A year or two back, he was tracked down in American obscurity and flown over to London to perform in front of fans he never knew he had. He died not long after, sadly.

Theodore Dalrymple and the Impressions

2010-01-05T16:51:00.004Z

It has quite a ring to it, doesn't it?

Dalrymple was quite well received on 5 Live in the end. Phil Williams was very fair, and recommended the book as 'shining a light into the harsh reality of some of things that are going on'.

You'll be able to listen again on the Radio 5 Live site here, once they stick up Phil's show. Dalrymple was on at about 3.15pm.

We sold half a dozen copies direct almost instantly, and more via Amazon marketplace (including copies to Holland, Norway and Sweden. Dalrymple is very popular in Holland, particularly.)

We've also had an enquiry re the TV rights. It may come to nothing - we've sold TV rights several times before, to no avail as yet - but his ear for dialogue is so good, and his experience so rare, that I think it has televisual legs. Personally, I think it would make a great black comedy. Very black.

Talking of The Impressions, this is getting a lot of play in the Monday Books empire at the moment:

That might just be the best piece of pop music ever recorded. But then, there's this:

And then, there's this:

Not forgetting this:

Dalrymple On BBC Radio 5 Live Tomorrow, And Other Media Stuff

2010-01-04T10:40:00.002Z

Theodore Dalrymple is on Radio 5 Live tomorrow at around 2.30pm, talking about our latest title Second Opinion (free extract here). It's the old Simon Mayo show as was, with Phil Williams in the chair. Phil seems a good sort, but I wonder if he'll get the point? I suppose it all depends on whether he has read the book, and whether he stops and thinks about the implications of its scenes being played out in all our major cities, all the time.

PC Bloggs was also on 5 Live over the Christmas break. She was called on to rebut Jack Straw's sugestion that the police are not being held back by bureaucracy but by laziness. (Inspector Gadget also looked at this.)

Bloggs made the point that if she wants to drive a police car to a given address, she has to fill in a form to say she is going to do so via an approved route, which will involve driving down a road where there has been a serious amount of car crime.

This might only take five minutes, but if you add up all those forms and remember that this is only one of many, it becomes more problematic.

And why are they filling in this particular form? The idea is to check that the cops are taking the designated routes, down roads with a history of car crime, and providing a lot of police visibility, thus reassuring the locals and deterring criminals. Which sounds fine until you consider two things:

1) The criminals will just move into the next road.

2. The tools are very blunt. One drunken youth smashing 20 wing mirrors on his way home from the pub one night - a one-off act of vandalism with 20 victims in an otherwise safe street - will skew the stats so that cops are driving down there for the next month, when the regular car criminals are actually active across town.

These two (and Copperfield before them) have long complained about the huge number of forms that need filling in just to deal with a simple shoplifting. Gadget wrote a piece for The Times about it just before Chistmas. I've spoken to dozens, if not hundreds, of police officers from all over the country who tell the same story: It takes something like four hours to fill in the forms. Jack Straw, who has never filled them in, says it takes 'an hour'.

I rang Gadget about this. His response: it might take an hour if it's a very simple case and you can turn off the radio, lock the door and write solidly. But in the real world, there are a great many possible complications.

The trouble for the police is that they are losing the support of the basically law-abiding; check out the comments on the Daily Telegraph website here. A lot agree with Straw, which is startling (given that he represents a party which has lied consistently to us since 1997; Telegraph readers ought to be wise by now).

Meanwhile, as Copperfield always said: there are plenty of cops, they're just doing the wrong things, and the reason they aren't coming out to your burglary is because of the bureaucracy Straw and his colleagues have introduced.

Finally, Gadget pops up in Trevor Kavanagh's Sun column today. It doesn't seem to be online, so here's a scan:

Merry Christmas To All Our Reader

2009-12-23T08:31:00.002Z

(From Sketchy Santas, via the excellent David Thompson)

During the meanwhilst, here's a little light (and free) reading to tide you over the festive season. Of course, if your elderly relatives give you money instead of presents, you know where to come.

Wasting Police Time

Perverting The Course Of Justice

Diary Of An On-Call Girl

It's Your Time You're Wasting

Theodore Dalrymple - Second Opinion

Theodore Dalrymple - Not With A Bang But A Whimper

When Science Goes Wrong

A Paramedic's Diary

In Foreign Fields

The Curse Of The Al-Dulaimi Hotel

Road Trip To Hell

Picking Up The Brass

Watching Men Burn

Happy Christmas!

Don't Even Know What Books Are, Mate

2009-12-21T12:59:00.004Z

England's third-best scrum-half Danny Care*, interviewed by Paul Ackford, in yesterday's Sunday Telegraph:

After half an hour I ask him what he does when he isn't on rugby duty. 'I like to play a bit of golf,' he says, 'chill out with friends, go to the cinema, a lot of PlayStation. We're all online on the new Call of Duty game. Its proper title is Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2. You go online and there are loads of boys from different clubs playing it. You've got your headsets and you can speak to people and abuse them while you're killing them basically.
Richard Wigglesworth [Sale], Tom Biggs [Newcastle] and Jordan Turner-Hall [Harlequins] are always online. Richard's the biggest addict. The total time he's been on is about five days. He's got a baby on the way so that'll cut his time down.
'The best player I've ever seen is Steve So'oialo [Harlequins]. He had a bad back injury last year so he was out for the whole season and he became amazing at the game. I think he got into the top 100 in the world. It's quite sad, but it's also quite fun for us professional rugby players.'
What about books and newspapers, I say, in classic, middle-aged, fuddy-duddy fashion? What happened to them? 'Don't even know what they are, mate. My mum keeps telling me to read some books so I reckon I've got a few presents coming my way at Christmas. I imagine they'll end up holding up the PlayStation.'

He seems to be fairly typical, sadly. At least he spends his leisure time harmlessly, though.

In Leith, where 'the kids have nothing to do', they took to stoning bus drivers and passing cars to while away the hours. (I like the comment from 'Americanbob', who says: 'Whilst decrying the behaviour and mentality of kids who carry out such attacks surely some blame must lie with the Council and TIE who's contractors are providing so much ammunition for these vandals. Stop digging up roads at random and leaving masses of rubble lying around, that might help!!')

In Hull, 'The kids have nothing to do, and they're into muggings and robbing old ladies.' Into robbing old ladies? Yikes.

In Worthing, teenagers are protesting about the closure of a club night for under-18s.

'Now the kids have nothing to do, so they will probably be going down to Waterstones or the local library and reading Frank Richards, and W E Johns, and John Buchan, and Willard Price, and Arthur Conan Doyle, and Andy Stanton, and the classics, and opening their eyes to a world they never dreamed of back into parks and the town centre at night.'

Look on the bright side. At least they don't live in Leek, where a contributor to knowhere.co.uk tells us that they are:

Bored Bored BORED, thats what its like to live in Leek, nothing to do except go to the pub, so that leaves the kids with fook all to do, so they wreck the place or get pissed/drugged up on a friday night....total crap, all caused by a council that is still stuck in the 1950's (ohh lets spend �� on some new lamps on the council building, B'STARDS.) No DSL connection, BT fookers :(

Or Barlby.

Dawn Martland helps teach swimming at the pool to students and children in the wider community, and said adult lessons were due to be introduced later in the year. She said it was hoped the pool, which opened two years ago at a cost of £60,000, could be opened to villagers at some point, but acts of vandalism such as this delayed such opportunities.
She said: 'They keep smashing their way in through the sides of the building – it’s the third time in a week apparently.
'The equipment was thrown everywhere and the brushes they clean the pool with were on the floor of the pool, which is 8ft deep.
'The school has paid a fortune to get it done up and, hopefully, everybody in Barlby will be able to use it eventually. There has been talk of getting it opened for families and OAPs. But when people keep vandalising things it makes it harder.'
While slamming the vandals, Mrs Martland did make the point that youngsters had very little to do in the village.

* After Harry Ellis and Ben Youngs.

Dalrymple - PEN / JR Ackerly Award

2009-12-19T09:20:00.001Z

Second Opinion has been 'called in' for consideration by the judges of the English PEN / JR Ackerley award. Our natural caution says it's unlikely to be shortlisted, good as it is (you can read a free extract here) but it's nice for it even to be considered.

(As ever, a plug: we send Dalrymple's titles free of postal charges to any address anywhere in the world- see our website.)

By the way, it's well worth visiting the PEN website here for news on the ongoing libel campaign. Together with Index on Censorship, they're doing great things to agitate for a change in the law.

Finally, via The Guardian, Regret The Error is a great website. They collate apologies for media cock-ups, and they've just published their annual 'best of' compilation.

Their favourite, from the august Washington Post, is:

Nov. 26 article in the District edition of Local Living incorrectly said a Public Enemy song declared 9/11 a joke. The song refers to 911, the emergency phone number.

Very good. My own favourite media mistake comes from Times political editor Roland Watson, back when we worked together in regional newspapers. We had a thing called 'Telly View', where you could earn £5 for writing, er, a telly review. Roland, who had watched a documentary about China, started his second paragraph with, 'The programme was conveniently divided up into bite-size chunks...'

Unfortunately, the letter 'u' is right next to the letter 'i' on a qwerty keyboard.

Gadget's War On Mad Bureaucracy Continues Apace

2009-12-13T13:38:00.004Z

After we published Perverting The Course Of Justice, I had a conversation with a well-known columnist on The Times.

When he called, I was hoping it was to congratulate us on a work of journalism well done, and to say he was going to mention it in his next column.

In fact, he had rung to berate me. 'The trouble is,' he said, 'it's so obviously not true. No-one is ever going to believe that stufff about the clock, so it destroys the rest of his case.'

If you want to know what he meant by 'that stufff about the clock', click on this link and go to the third or fourth page.

Anyway, as Gadget points out in his latest blog, it's been revealed that another force will not allow its officers to change a light bulb or a loo roll. They have to call in contractors.

The local paper has the story here. The comments on Gadget's blog are interesting.

PC A Hunn writes:

'On a similar vein we have posters up in every toilet of instructions on how to wash your hands but no money left in the A/C budget to buy soap… Sums it up really…. chuffing loonacy.'

Metcountymounty writes (of police cars in the Met):

'...they removed all the spare bulbs to make sure we didn’t change them. The same contractor has to be called out to change the wheels for us if we get a flat as all of the equipment have been taken out of all the vehicles so we couldn’t even change the tyre out of sheer militancy. Same goes for jump leads actually...'

PC Hawkeye:

'Funnyist I saw was the janitor sweeping the yard clear of snow.
That bit wasn’t funny particularly, putting the snow into bin bags and then loading them into the divisional van to take to the tip was though. yes, it’s true.'

Not so amusing is the comment by 'Vetnurse':

'My Dad is disabled. if he falls then his carer is not allowed to a) help catch him or support him as he falls and b) not allowed to help him back up once down. Either my mum or family member or an ambulance must be called. Even though he is not hurt. Oh and if my mum is helping him up they can not help so have to leave an 85year old to get the 92 year old up.'

Oh, So You're Two Doctors?

2009-12-11T11:13:00.005Z

We recently signed a deal with Times and Pulse doctor (and former Medical Journalist of the Year) Tony Copperfield to publish a book about the trials and tribulations of working as a GP in modern Britain. Actually, 'Tony' is two doctors writing under a pseudonym. I was with them in 'that London' yesterday evening, and they regaled me with tales of mad bureaucracy to rival anything in any of our previous books. Oh, how we chortled at the waste, mismanagement and lunacy!

Sick Notes will be published next spring.

We're working on a cover; here's the initial stab. Not great. 'Too posh, he looks like one of those bastard consultants,' was their considered verdict.

Staying with matters medical, our paramedic Stuart Gray (as ever, there is a free extract from his book, A Paramedic's Diary, on the relevant page on our website), has been invited to appear on a TV show called Bizarre ER. More details as and when we get them.

The general gloom in the book trade isn't getting any better. Waterstone's is having a tough time of it, with parent company HMV describing its latest set of results as 'weak'. In the 26 weeks to October 24, sales fell by 4.3%; like-for-like was even worse, at -5.1%. And the Waterstone's operating loss also increased from £9.3m to £12.9m this year. That said, the new distribution hub is apparently doing better than expected.

Finally, the unfunny Alexei Sayle writes about libel in the Guardian. It's very interesting. If you think - as we do - that libel law needs reforming, you can sign up to the petition at www.libelreform.org.

Former TV weatherman Michael Fish recently half-threatened to sue us for libel over the chapter concerning 'the Great Storm' in When Science Goes Wrong. We pointed out that everything Simon Le Vay says in the book is based on official documents (some of which have never been seen before); additionally, we didn't think it was libellous anyway. So he decided against. But a friend of ours who runs a bigger independent publisher than Monday has recently spent tens of thousands of pounds defending a libel claim made by a murderer who claimed his reputation was damaged by a book which attributed another murder to him (a murder, moreover, that he almost certainly committed). Utterly mad.

Scally Scally Scouse

2009-12-08T12:32:00.000Z

The book trade is collapsing, the economy's tanking and Afghanistan drags on.

But there's always Mundo Jazz.

Education In The Times

2009-12-04T10:13:00.003Z

Frank Chalk's book It's Your Time You're Wasting was described in The Times as 'sour', 'vituperative' and 'ghastly' - though also 'addictive'. (Free extract here - free p&p in the UK.)

I think this was on the same basis that the same newspaper recently published a review criticising Theodore Dalrymple's Second Opinion. Just as Dalrymple was taken (falsely) to task for 'not liking his patients', a regular line of attack against Chalk is that he 'doesn't like children'.

For the life of me, I cannot understand why it should be necessary for teachers to 'like' children, or doctors to 'like' their patients - in both cases, all we require, surely, is that they are fair and humane and technically accomplished.

As it happens, unlike the Times reviewer, I actually know Chalk; in fact, he likes children perfectly well - he's met mine, and he didn't beat them. It's just that, in class, he expects them to sit reasonably quietly and listen, not to swear at him, swap porn and smoke cannabis. All terribly old-fashioned, of course, which will never do. Let the kids express themselves! Make sure you like them! Who cares if they leave school utterly unemployable, facing 60 years of poverty?

Funnily enough, The Times today carries a column by another blogging beak, 'Mr Teacher'.

He quotes Asda's chief operating officer, Andy Clarke, as saying 'No one can deny that Britain has spawned a generation of young people who struggle to read, write or do simple maths. That’s why we’re finding packs of nappies discarded in the booze aisle, as the last few pounds are spent on alcohol rather than childcare.'

(These) comments were met with denials, howls of derision and claims of elitism from some quarters. When I heard what they had said, I simply nodded my head in knowing approval. This is because they are absolutely spot-on. The permitted standard of general education is at an appallingly low level. A massive percentage of the students I teach struggle on a daily basis with basic literacy and numeracy. Some are unable to communicate properly by any means.

It's an interesting but familiar read, and the comments are worth looking at too.

By the way, I've known The Times' political editor Roland Watson and recently-appointed Head of News Dave Taylor for 20 years or more. They are both very good people, and extremely good company, but neither of them have the faintest clue about what's going on in modern Britain. (Though they'd say the same about me, I'm sure.)

Gadget And Bloggs In The Times and The Guardian

2009-12-03T09:41:00.003Z

It was quite a busy day with calls from the media yesterday. They were looking for responses to today's policing White Paper, which aims to cut £500 million from police budgets over the next few years.

First BBC Breakfast News called for PC Bloggs, but she's working this morning so couldn't go on. Inspector Gadget won't do TV, sadly.

Then Sean O'Neill, crime editor at The Times, rang to ask whether Gadget could write a piece for them about the bureaucracy which still bedevils the job, and which costs time, and therefore money.

This was the newspaper which exposed his fellow undercover-cop-blogger, Nightjack, a while back, so Gadget was wary. But they were happy to take an (edited) extract from his book, so there was no need for any personal contact.

It appears here, and is a good read (though there's more depth to it in the book, obviously).

Finally, The Guardian's crime correspondent Sandra Laville called for PC Bloggs. Would Bloggsy do a first-person piece about another aspect of the cost-cutting plans, single-crewing. It's here.

These were supposed to be quid pro quo; The Times credited Gadget, named his book and his blog. We sent Sandra Laville the credit we'd like - 'PC Bloggs is the author of Diary of an On-Call Girl' - but she ignored that and just named the blog. (She got that wrong, too.)

UPDATE: EMBARRASSINGLY, THIS WAS OUR FAULT - WE GOT SANDRA'S EMAIL ADDRESS WRONG...

Meanwhile, The Bookseller has the latest at Borders, from an insider: 'MCR sack all the buyers at head office, 36 people are told to leave the store support building in London. They have half an hour to gather their things.'

Team Building Away Days

2009-12-02T10:50:00.002Z

Police officers should be sent out 'single-crewed' to help cut £500 million from the policing bill, according to a White paper due out tomorrow.

All I can say is they haven't been speaking to Inspector Gadget or PC Bloggs, or any other working copper.

If you send police out on their own:

1. More will be assaulted.
2. They won't be able to make any arrests, so will have to call for back-up, which will mean three officers at a scene, instead of one.
3. They won't be able to give evidence, because magistrates (and juries) will no longer take the word of a single policeman over that of a defendant.

Apart from that, it's a great idea.

It was probably dreamed up in a meeting or on some ACPO away day. There's a good piece by Theodore Dalrymple here about the expensive bilge of workshops, courses and team building exercises etc.

Funnily enough, Gadget points out the real-world effect of this in the latest header to his blog:

Most major organisations seem to be infested with this stuff, and the police seem to be worse than many. Ever increasing numbers of employees sit around talking about policing and drawing up plans, while ever-decreasing numbers of cops are actually out there nicking villains.

It's the sort of mentality which leads to the (I think) hilarious situation at Gadget's force where they employ a man whose job it is to tour the police stations changing all the clocks from GMT to BST and back again each year. Of course, because there are lots of stations, it takes him ages to get round them all, so the clocks are often an hour wrong for months at a time.

Last year, Gadget got up on a chair and changed the clock himself - only for the Unison rep at his nick to get up on a chair and change the clock back to the wrong time. I can't think of a better definition of institutional madness than that.

Click on the links for free excerpts from Gadget's Perverting The Course of Justice and Dalrmple's Second Opinion and Not With A Bang But A Whimper.

We ship all our books free of postal charges to UK addresses, and we ship Dalrymple's titles free of postal charges anywhere in the world.

There Are Flops, And Flops

2009-12-01T13:22:00.003Z

Valéry Giscard d'Estaing recently produced a novel about 'a president' and his relationship with 'a princess'.

At first, it was taken as a thinly-disguised claim that he'd enjoyed a fling with Diana. Now it seems it's just fiction.

Either way, it wouldn't have been for me. But the funny thing is, the Telegraph describes it as a 'flop' after it sold 'just 18,000 copies' in its first month or so in print.

If we published flops like that, I'd be writing this from Courchevel 1850*, where 52 sq m, two-bed apartments are currently going for half a million pounds. If I could stand the Russians.

Instead, we publish flops like So That's Why They Call It Great Britain, currently languishing at around 116,000 on Amazon.

It's a cruel world: STWTCIGB is actually a very interesting and amusing book (there's a free extract here) which would make an ideal Christmas present for almost anyone.

*Pointless Courchevel fact: the highest point at 1850 is actually 1,747m

Borders, and Fleet Street Bullying

2009-11-27T13:02:00.003Z

Borders is in trouble, which is not good news. There are 40-odd stores, and it's not hard to see how if (or when) they close down the loss of those outlets will hit publishers. (Of course, we won't be hit as hard as the 1,000+ staff.)

The administrators blame internet and supermarket competition and the rise of electronic readers. Obviously, if you buy online or at Tesco, or you download your books onto an e-reader, you are not buying from a bookstore and the bookstore will eventually go bust.

Should this worry book-lovers? Well, since publishers are typically charged a greater discount by online retailers and the supermarkets (ie they make less money on books bought that way), obviously it makes publishing less profitable. If publishing is less profitable...

E-readers may help - though we're not very keen on them here - because there are no print and shipping costs involved. But these are not the major costs in publishing anyway, so that's not the whole solution. It's worrying.

Hachette (Headline, Hodder and Stoughton, John Murray, little brown and others) are just the latest to announce they are making people redundant and trimming back their publishing programme, according to The Bookseller. Agents are complaining, too. Luigi Bonomi of LBA says the autumn has been 'disastrous'.

Meanwhile, News of the World sports writer Matt Driscoll has been awarded nearly £800,000 for being bullied out of his job by Andy Coulson, now working for David Cameron at the Conservative Party.
The full story is here in the Guardian - oddly, the only paper to think it newsworthy.

I knew Andy back in the 1990s (and could tell some interesting stories about nights out with him): he certainly never struck me as being the sort of person who was capable of inspiring fear in anyone, but then he wasn't an editor at that point.

Editors could and did sack people on the spot for the most trivial things: in Matt Driscoll's case, it all stemmed from his failure to stand up a Coulson tip that Arsenal would be playing in purple shirts. Maybe it's just me, but who cares?

Fleet Street was always full of 'bollockings', of course. There's a piece here at the Sports Journalists' Association website about the Driscoll/Coulson saga. Inter alia, it tells a great story about a fearsome Sun sports editor, Frank Nicklin, dishing out a monstering to a journalist called Peter Batt.

Peter snapped and started throwing the four volumes of the London telephone directories at his snarling boss.
Nicklin - an exceptional all-round sportsman in his youth - trapped A to F, chested away G to K, headed L to R and volleyed S to Z back at Batty.
The scene was so Pythonesque that they collapsed laughing and took their argument to the more suitable surroundings of the pub, where it ended with mutual back slapping. Nicklin the Terrible was a pussycat at heart.

It's a shame Matt Driscoll and Andy Coulson couldn't settle their differences that way (Driscoll would have liked to have done so he said on Radio 5 Live this morning), but things are different now.

I was on the wrong end of a lot of Fleet Street bollockings myself - most of them justified, sadly.

I worked for the endoubted tabloid genius Kelvin MacKenzie, a man who verbally assaulted one executive so badly that the man faked a fainting fit in an attempt to get away. Kelvin merely carried on yelling at his prone form. Another senior journalist went AWOL after failing to deliver the goods on a story and, desperate to evade the inevitable storm, booked himself into a mental health hospital for several days, the staff being instructed to refuse all telephone calls.

Very rarely did anyone bite back: We'd all worked so hard (or, in my case, been so lucky) to be where we were that we were terrified of being canned, though, looking back at a world where purple football shirts are important, that seems mad now.

One who did stand up to him was Simon Hughes, a hard-bitten, rugby-playing Sun reporter from the West Country. I have no idea what the row was about, but I thought Simon was going to punch him; the newsroom ground to a halt, with people craning their necks to watch and listen from 200 feet away (it was a big newsroom). Eventually, Kelvin backed down, to general astonishment.

The atmosphere was generally tense and unpleasant, but it was never dull; when I talk to fellow survivors now, there's a general feeling that we lived through something extraordinary.

FOR READERS OF THIS BLOG WHO ARE CONCERNED ABOUT THE FINANCIAL VIABILITY OF MONDAY BOOKS, OR THE LONG-TERM PSYCHOLOGICAL EFFECTS OF BULLYING AT WORK, THERE'S ALWAYS THE OPTION OF VISITING OUR WEBSITE AND BUYING SOME OF OUR TITLES. THERE ARE FREE SAMPLES, TOO, AND WE SHIP FREE OF CHARGE IN THE UK (WE SHIP OUR THEODORE DALRYMPLE TITLES FREE OF CHARGE WORLDWIDE.)

Read This And Try Not To Weep

2009-11-26T12:55:00.006Z

A mum writes about her son's experience at a school in sleepy Dorset, of all places*.

It will probably bring tears to your eyes, though it won't surprise you if you've read Frank Chalk's book It's Your Time You're Wasting (see here, with a free extract).

It won't surprise you, either, that Chalk's book was described in The Times (see previous blog) as 'sour and vituperative' - because it didn't pretend that all of our schools are beacons of excellence where 'the best-educated generation in history' are achieving ever-greater things; as Orwell said, in times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

*OK, the school is in Bournemouth, but Bournemouth is a pretty small town of 160,00 people; it's not Birmingham, or Coventry, or Sheffield, or Glasgow. For overseas visitors, many of our state schools actually are very good, but some are terrible. As for Dorset - the county in which Bournemouth is located - it is one of England's most beautiful and tranquil areas, as a browse through these photos on Flickr will confirm.

Media Stuff

2009-11-23T11:30:00.007Z

The Times reviewed Second Opinion the other day. It was a bit blink-and-you-miss-it, so we did. (Quick plug: see www.mondaybooks.com for our Dalrymple titles and free extracts therefrom; we send them anywhere in the world with no charge for post and packaging.)

I don't think Mr Finlayson has quite understood Dalrymple's position.

Dalrymple didn't 'drive a BMW through the squalor of urban lowlife', he lived and worked amongst it for many years (unlike, I suspect, Mr Finlayson).

Thus, his cannot be - as Mr Finlayson apparently wishes it was - 'the voice of the man on the Clapham omnibus'. The man on the Clapham omnibus has not seen and done what Dalrymple has seen and done, and would be better off writing about life on the Clapham omnibus.

Dalrymple doesn't 'dislike his patients' - at least, not all of them, en masse. As would be plain to anyone who has actually read the book, he feels strongly for some and dislikes others immensely, but then who would not dislike a man who beats and tortures his wife, or kicks his girlfriend down the stairs to procure a miscarriage, or threatens to kill the doctors and nurses who are trying to heal him? Mr Finlasyon, I assume, would love such people!

Meanwhile, Trevor Kavanagh praised Second Opinion on BBC1's Andrew Marr show on Sunday (here, about 19 minutes in for anyone who's interested). We didn't send Trevor a review copy, so he must have bought it. I think that's called a double whammy.

He was discussing this piece in The Observer (headlined 'Teenage Girls Face Sexual Violence Threat' in the paper version), which revealed that a quarter of young women are slapped and punched by their boyfriends. 'I recommend (Second Opinion),' said Kavanagh. 'Chapter after chapter describes the horrific abuse of young girls by thuggish men who often end up in prison. It is routine, unfortunately.'

Thuggish men, presumably, that Iain Finlayson thinks it quite wrong to 'dislike'.

On other matters, Radio 4's PM programme called on Saturday afternoon to see if PC Bloggs would like to comment on Home Secretary Alan Johnson's suggestion that all victims of crime should be visited by the police. Unfortunately, we couldn't raise Bloggs until 5pm, by which time the show as on air and it was too late. Shame - Eddie Mair is my favourite BBC presenter (unless its Evan Davis, Jonathan Agnew, Eddie Butler or possibly Fi Glover).

Anyway, I think what Bloggs would have told Eddie is this:

I think it would be jolly nice if we had marked police cars with the fluoerescent stickers not peeling off, hats that don't make us look like German strippers and enough blankets in custody to comply with common human decency in housing prisoners. If money were no issue, no doubt the Senior Managers would like us to have all that too.
So my questions to Alan Johnson are:
1) If he would like the police to attend all victims of crime, what would he like us NOT to do instead?
2) On exactly which planet is the Home Office based?
There's also the small matter that not everyone who thinks they are a victim of crime actually is one. And at the moment we spend more time visiting people who were looked at funny in the street or sent racist Bebo messages, than we do commiserating with the owners of smashed up cars and ransacked houses. And we still don't have time to get through them all.

All Teased Out

2009-11-19T09:36:00.002Z

Frank Chalk asks the following brainteaser, which flummoxed us:

There are eight balls on the table in front of you, along with a set of balance scales.
They look identical, but one ball is heavier than the others.
Which one?
You can't touch any of them, but you can ask someone else to weigh them on the scales for you.
You get two weighings, and you can use any number of the balls in each weighing.

Here's one we did manage to work out:

You're in a room with two doors.
If you exit via Door A you will die. If you exit through Door B you will live.
A man guards each door; if asked, he will tell you which door is the safe door through which to exit.
One of the men always lies, and the other always tells the truth.
Unfortunately, you don't know which is which.
You are allowed one question only, to one man only.
What question should you ask?

If that's all too taxing, check out Angry People In Local Newspapers. Two of us worked in local newspapers for a while (a long time ago) and it all rings horribly true.

Stuff For Writers

2009-11-16T18:09:00.001Z

Joel Stickly's How To Write Badly Well is very funny. (I particularly like the post entitled 'Learn about syllepsis, then refuse to stop employing it'. I had forgotten the word 'syllepsis' existed.)

Inky Fool is good on lots of things but very good on journalese: 'prompting fury', 'the realms of possibility' and whether the Daily Telegraph can possibly be a 'quality daily'.

There's some interesting stuff here for would-be screenwriters and this reverse dictionary helps when the word you want is on the tip of your tongue.

Theodore Dalrymple in The Daily Telegraph

2009-11-13T10:21:00.003Z

Dalrymple writes on the subject of nurses and university degrees for the Telegraph today:

I was very fortunate for much of my career to work with nurses of the highest calibre. They were exactly as nurses should be: highly competent, very kind, yet capable of a certain steeliness when required – as, alas, it sometimes, and perhaps increasingly, was. They were intelligent, dedicated, and team-spirited. Quite by chance, I worked with the best nurses anyone could have wished for.
Most of them did not have degrees; they were trained under the old apprenticeship system, and had learned on the job. They viewed the new graduate nurses with a jaundiced eye: not because they had anything against graduates as such, but because they found that the graduates were much more distant from and uninvolved with the patients. When they came from the halls of a university to do supposedly practical work on the wards, they were more likely to remain on the sidelines as observers rather than muck in.

Obviously, plenty of good nurses will come out of the uni system, too, but it does seem odd that so many professions and trades now require degrees. Not all that long ago, you could become a barrister by learning on-the-job, and I know people who did it; now (I think?) this is unheard of. Tesco recently announced it will only accept graduate trainees with 2:1 degrees, which means they wouldn't take on Bill Gates, Paul Allen or Richard Branson. In journalism, until recently it used to be the case that you could get a job with A levels, which is really all you need - some evidence of basic native intelligence, plus a little curiosity. The rest you can learn from the older hands around you. Nowadays, the great Frank Johnson wouldn't even get through the door at the Telegraph (unless to deliver sandwiches or post).

There's an eye-opening list of people here who (apparently) either never attended university or didn't graduate - it includes an amazing number of billionaires. That says something, though I'm not sure what.

Free extracts from Theodore Dalrymple's books Not With A Bang But A Whimper and Second Opinion are available here and here and we ship both titles worldwide free of charge.

Theodore Dalrymple: Radio 4 'Law In Action'

2009-11-11T12:48:00.009Z

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I was talking to Inspector Gadget last week about the horrendous problems he and his officers face in dealing with mentally ill people in his police area.

I wish I could write here what he told me - it was so staggering, and so scandalous, that it would make the front pages of any of the serious newspapers - but to do so might identify him.

However, I've talked regularly to a lot of other police officers in recent years. It is not at all unusual for them to disarm ranting, mouth-foaming madmen wielding Samurai swords and threatening to kill everyone within slashing distance - and then find themselves quite unable to place them anywhere.

They can't leave them at A&E, for obvious reasons; often, the custody sergeant won't take them, because they're mentally ill (and a police station is not the place, since despite their often awful actions they may not have committed a 'crime' in the legal sense); and they can't get them admitted to psychiatric hospitals because most have closed and there are hardly any beds left.

So, often, police officers spend hours driving around with a madman in the back of their patrol car trying to find appropriate accommodation.

Theodore Dalrymple was a contributor to yesterday's Law In Action (Radio 4 - the podcast is available here I hope, though it may not be available to overseas listeners).

It was all about the undoubted scandal of the way in which the (genuinely) mentally ill who commit what would otherwise be serious crimes are treated.

'In 1998,' ran the intro, 'the Office of National Statistics revealed that 9 out of 10 people in prison had mental health issues... Are the courts identifying people early enough and dealing with them properly?'

The answer seems to be no, though there is a caveat - the word 'genuinely' above - to that.

The programme focused on those who slip through the net and do end up in custody when they actually need treatment. One was Shane, who spent more than a year in prison for arson with intent (he burned down his parents' shed and tried to set the house on fire) because of disputes about how, and if, his mental issues could be treated.

Shane was described as '23, and a big lad for his age', which was odd. At 23 he is a grown man, not a 'lad', and his size cannot sensibly be described in relation to his age. The effect of this wording was surely to emphasise him as a victim deserving of sympathy; this seemed to me like a signpost to the reporter's own views (and an unnecessary one, since Shane appeared to deserve the sympathy anyway).

But the main problem was the programme's definition of 'mental health issues', and that suggestion that 9 out of 10 people in prison suffer from them.

Dalrymple's claim - and he is a consultant psychiatrist who has seen more than his share of the common-or-garden mad, of mad prisoners and of non-mad prisoners - is that this is a nonsense figure (at least in context of a discussion about whether they should or should not be in jail). These 'issues' are not all treatable mental illnesses with causal impact on criminal actions, and the statistic is designed to cover up the failure to treat properly those who really need it and to provide escape routes from justice for those who don't.

'One must not ever forget that the relationship between offending and mental health problems or illness is not a simple one,' he says. 'It's not just, if you commit an offence and you have some kind of psychiatric condition, you commit your offence because you have that condition. And we must bear in mind that the principal function of the criminal justice system is to protect the public from crime, which, incidentally, it's extremely bad at doing.'

A solicitor on the programme demurred slightly. 'Actually,' she said, 'sending people to prison will probably just send them back out again to re-offend.'

Dalrymple: 'No, I'm not convinced by that at all. The argument that people reoffend when they leave prison is an argument for keeping them in for longer.'

Host: 'So if we were to lock everyone up for very long periods of time, that would assist?'

Dalrymple: 'It would assist, yes. I don't think there's much doubt about that.'

The great thing about Dalrymple - a very humane man, actually - is that he speaks his mind; you don't have to agree with him to appreciate the rarity of this. Wouldn't life be better if all of our politicians and other opinion formers spoke as openly as this about everything, and allowed us, as adults, to make up our own minds?

Free extracts from his books Not With A Bang But A Whimper and Second Opinion are available here and here and we ship both titles worldwide free of charge.

What Would Tacitus Do?

2009-11-10T11:03:00.003Z

There's an interesting piece in The Guardian today by Stuart Jeffries about how 'Waterstones killed bookselling'.

Apparently, he found himself in the Bloomsbury branch 'trying to find a quiet seat to read Tacitus's account of Seneca's suicide' - and surely we can all sympathise with him on that score, especially if we hope soon to find ourselves appearing in Pseuds Corner - when he overheard a conversation between a customer and a Waterstone's employee.

The customer was having a hard time understanding the cheap deal on Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel.

'I'm confused,' she says. 'It says here that if I spend more than £10 I can have the book for £8.99.' That would be a good deal: the recommended retail price (RRP) for the hardback is £18.99. But there is a problem. 'I only want to buy this book and nothing else. Does that mean I'll have to pay the full price, £18.99?'

'I wish they wouldn't do that,' the assistant says. 'They shouldn't have deals that are so confusing it takes more than a minute to explain.'

'More than a minute'? We learn later that the customer was 'a lecturer from London University's School of Oriental and African Studies', so I imagine she's a few dozen points up the IQ scale from where I languish, and yet I understood it in the time it took to read that sentence. Weird.

The assistant explains that if the customer only buys the Mantel today, she would get £5 off the recommended price (ie she would pay £13.99).

The customer left empty-handed; after all, Bloomsbury Waterstone's only stocks around 100,000 books, so she could hardly be expected to browse for something else to buy along with 'the Mantel' to take advantage of the cheap deal, could she?

Jeffries puts it all down to 'late capitalism', and adds: 'It makes buying the most straightforward item such a nightmare that you leave the shop having saved yourself a tenner, but in the process a nice lunchtime excursion has become a frustrating fiasco.'

Given that he writes for a newspaper which only survives by bleeding dry great regional titles like The Manchester Evening News, and closing others forthwith, you might feel that he's got a bit of a nerve. At best, I don't think he understands business - not something which is unusual for journalists, in his defence.

There's a lot of other stuff about how terrible it is that Waterstone's sell Jordan's books, and a quote from Mark Le Fanu, general secretary of the Society of Authors: 'The emphasis given to the few is staggering. It's our mid-list authors, who may not write the most commercial books but who often write the best, who are suffering. The big corporate publishers dominate the shelves and squeeze out smaller publishers.'

Well, we're one of those smaller publishers, and I know how he feels. I'd love for our books to be on tables out front, and sold at full price, but frankly I wouldn't recommend it to Waterstone's as a serious model. (The same goes for 95% of the books published in the UK in any given year; they are of niche interest to a few hundred thousand readers and the clue is in Le Fanu's remark that they are not particularly commercial.)

While I don't read Jordan, or even look at the pictures, I can't see how bookshops not stocking her would make things better for us. Waterstone's earn their profits on the back of celeb dross; if they stocked nothing but Hilary Mantel, Theodore Dalrymple and, er, Tacitus they'd go bust very quickly. And then where would we be?

THEODORE DALRYMPLE'S TITLES ARE AVAILABLE WITH FREE POSTAGE AND PACKING TO ANY ADDRESS ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD - see www.mondaybooks.com for these and all our titles

Eddy Nugent on Radio 4

2009-11-04T09:46:00.002Z

Ian Deacon and Charlie Bell, a.k.a. Eddy Nugent, appeared on Radio 4's travel show Excess Baggage at the weekend.

I was slightly mystified as to why the producers were interested, which only goes to show how little imagination I have: the host John McCarthy (of radiator fame) extracted a very interesting 15 minutes out of Ian and Charlie about their travels in Ireland, Belize, Germany and the Balkans (aided by the fact that they are both natural raconteurs, with an eye for the bizarre, and very dry with it).

You can listen to them here from about 15 minutes in (though for some reason the recording cuts off just before the interview ends).

You can buy the book here - free postage and packing in the UK or to in-theatre BFPO addresses.

Posted by Dan

Gadget/Dalrymple

2009-11-02T18:20:00.002Z

A nice plug for Second Opinion from Inspector Gadget: 'his writing style makes the book an uplifting read in a funny kind of way. You would expect this content to be depressing, but he avoids this with a skill I can only marvel at.'

You can read a free extract from Second Opinion here.

You can read a free extract from Not With A Bang But A Whimper here.

(And you can read a free extract from Perverting The Course Of Justice here.)

THEODORE DALRYMPLE'S TITLES ARE AVAILABLE WITH FREE POSTAGE AND PACKING TO ANY ADDRESS ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD

Posted by MB

Humpty McNumpty Didn't Take A Great Fall

2009-10-29T10:18:00.003Z

Inspector Gadget pretends to be surprised that Tony McNumpty is about to walk away from his own little expenses scandal with not much more than a slap on the wrist.

Sadly, it's pretty much in line with our prediction.

Our regular reader won't need reminding but, for the other 61,999,999,999 of you, McNulty is the man who, when Police Minister, denounced PC Copperfield's Wasting Police Time as 'a work of fiction'. He later had to apologise for that too.

If you haven't read Wasting Police Time, there's a free extract here (there are free extracts of all our books on the relevant pages on our website).

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Posted by Sam

Viz Readers' Letters

2009-10-27T10:56:00.003Z

Sinclair McKay says in this week's Spectator that Viz is a conservative magazine. He bases this on its targets - right-on parents, students and drunken yobbos. Rod Liddle's not so sure.

Anyway, a friend emailed me a list of Viz's parodic readers' letters this morning. Someone ought to publish a book of them:

Hats off to the witty burglars who stole my entire CD collection with the exception of There is Nothing Left to Lose by the Foo Fighters. I hope that, when sentencing, the judge takes into account their splendid sense of humour.

Imagine my shock at getting a letter from my doctor advising me I only had a month to live but thankfully the letter was not for me but for my son with the same name who lives with us. Close call.

I have just returned from a diplomatic trip to the Congo and I can testify that at no point did I see anyone drinking Um Bongo.

Why don't NHS bosses start hiring obsessive compulsives as nurses? Their attention to hygiene and constant hand washing would see an end to MRSA outbreaks in no time.

These so-called speed bumps are a joke. If anything, they slow you down.

We should remember the tremendous contribution of the Queen Mother to the war effort: as the BBC pointed out, she 'bravely remained in London beside her husband' during the war. This contrasts sharply with the actions of my grandfather who, on the declaration of war immediately left his wife and children and p*ssed off, first to France, then North Africa, Italy, France (again) and finally Germany. The shame will always be with us.

Like the Queen Mum, my grandfather was a frequent visitor to the East End during the dark days of the blitz, but he was never hailed as a hero by the people of London. (Sent in by reader Werner Hoffman of Munich.)

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Posted by Dan

Tony McNulty: Say It Ain't So

2009-10-26T10:14:00.006Z

Judge not, that ye be not judged, wrote St Matthew.

Forbear to judge, for we are sinners all, said Shakespeare.

We can never judge the lives of others, because each man knows only his own pain and renunciation, according to Paulo Coelho.

Well, up to a point, Lord Copper.

Our old friend Tony McNumpty is up before the beak, metaphorically speaking, this week.

The Mail on Sunday speculates that he could be suspended and possibly forced to stand down as an MP. That would be a tragic waste of a career spent in disinterested public service. We await the outcome of the report with interest.

Meanwhile, a year or so ago, in a post entitled 'Inspector Gadget Was Right', we noted that violent crime was a lot worse than the police (or Mr McNulty's successors in office) were admitting.

Of course, things are much better today. Oops. Apparently not: according to The Times, the police are still failing to record thousands of violent crimes properly.

Not a surprise to anyone who has read Perverting The Course Of Justice or Gadget's blog.

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Posted by Dan